In the mid-1930s, when the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow began to publish his autobiography, he gave it the formidable title The Book of Life: Reminiscences and Reflections, Material for the History of My Time. Drawing not only on his memory, but on copious diaries and a prodigious literary output going back to the 1880s, Dubnow traced his journey from shtetl Judaism to Jewish nationalism—a journey typical (onemight almost say prototypical) of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewish intellectual's search for a new definition of himself as Jew and modern man. The substance of Dubnow's Book of Life frees the title from pretentiousness; more than a mere compilation, much of the autobiography (especially the first volume and a half) was an act of synthesis and integratsiia dushi (“self-integration”), two of Dubnow's favorite terms. My aim in this paper is to reflect anew on the process of Dubnow's self-integration, bridging the gap between a purely biographical approach and a purely ideological one in order to show how a distinctive nationalist stance crystallized out of Dubnow's personal growth. Nationalism was a hard-won, by no means self-evident solution to an overlapping sequence of emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Dubnow provides us with a picture of the groping that this self-transformation entailed, a picture that can be supplemented, and to a certain extent revised, by listening for resonances between life and thought undetected by Dubnow himself.

Reinterpretation is one of the most characteristic qualities of Jewish folklore. In the process of reinterpretation, “alien” material is adapted and varied to find meaningful expression within the framework of Jewish life and tradition. An example of this process is the ballad “Nemo Delale” in the Zakho Jewish dialect of Neo-Aramaic. A variant of the important and well-known ballad narrative associated with the Balkan Peninsula, “The Bridge of Arta,” this ballad is known in Greek as “The Bridge of Arta” (Lawson 1910: 263), in Albanian as “Rozafati” (Skendi 1954: 50–55), in Serbian as “Zidanje Skadra” (Skendi 1954: 50–55), in Rumanian as “Master Manhole or the Building of Arges” (Entwistle 1939: 309), and in Judeo-Spanish as “The Princess and the Bozaǧí” (Attias 1956: 161–162). Versions have also been collected in Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Hungarian. Hitherto the distribution of the ballad was considered to be limited exclusively to the Balkan Peninsula (Armistead and Silverman 1963: 16). The appearance of the ballad as far east as Kurdistan, and among the Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jews of Zakho, raises theoretical questions in regard to the diffusion of the ballad to the east, and in regard to the possibility of contact among Jewish groups of this area.

It is not simply the bounty of novel directives found in Sefer Ḥasidim that constitute the most puzzling feature of that work, nor even their occasional strangeness, but rather the awesome authority claimed for these prescripts. Divine punishment of the direst sort awaits those who fail, even unwittingly, to comply with them. Indeed, entire communities have been doomed by just such unintended transgressions.

In Hermes, LIV (1919), F. Preisigke discussed the term πύργoς, suggesting inter alia, that it bears the meaning of a “farm building” on the basis of papyrological sources. In the following year in the same journal, E. Meyer supported this contention, pointing out the suitability of such a meaning for such NT passages as Mark 12:1 = Matthew 21:33 (and, to a lesser extent, Luke 14:20). The discussion was succinctly summarized in Moulton and Milligan's Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. πύργoς.

The root metaphor of God's kingship appears to have been the most fertile of those applied to God in the Bible. Although this metaphor was commonly applied to deities in the ancient Near East, in Israel it bore unique fruits. The seriousness with which it was taken is manifested in Israel's unique conception of her relation with God as a covenant with a suzerain. Conformably, Israel viewed her title to her land as a grant from the suzerain. Her prophets were pictured as royal messengers or ambassadors. Similarly expressive of God's kingship is the Israelite concept of divine authorship of laws, a role reserved for kings elsewhere in the ancient Near East.