This article asserts that politics motivated Aharon Reuveni to employ representations of psychic fragmentation and dysfunctional social institutions to portray Palestinian Jewish life in his novelistic trilogy ‘Ad Yerushalayim. These purportedly decadent representations helped him foreground individual and collective flaws he saw limiting the early twentieth-century Palestinian Jewish community's development and promote norms he saw as conducive to growth. Thus, as examination of the trilogy's central male figures demonstrates, Reuveni advances a Zionist masculinity grounded in introspectiveness and ongoing commitment to the achievement of communally shared goals. To further support this Zionist masculine form, the trilogy categorizes men who pursue homosocial ties with others who don't maintain this masculinity as homosexuals. Thus gender and sexuality are used to coerce male readers into adopting specific behavioral norms. This attention to gender and sexuality's role in early twentieth-century Palestinian Hebrew fiction offers a way to grasp its long-overlooked political character.

While rejecting the traditional belief that Jewish fate was controlled by God, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the Jews maintained prior perceptions of post-70 Jewish history as a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Beginning in 1928, the young Salo Baron combatted this perspective on the Jewish past, which he dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” In his well-known 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” and more substantially in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron vigorously rejected this view. In the process, he formulated a new periodization of the Jewish past and moved beyond the ideologically grounded and programmatic reconstruction of Jewish history to a rigorously descriptive portrayal of the multi-faceted Jewish historical experience. In so doing, Baron laid the foundations of the flourishing contemporary Jewish historiographic enterprise.

This article traces the origins and rapid spread of the Mourner's Kaddish, a liturgical custom first attested in late twelfth- early thirteenth-century Ashkenazic halakhic texts. While scholars have traditionally linked it to the martyrological needs of post-1096 Ashkenazic communities, this article suggests that the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish was one manifestation of a broader shift in medieval Jewish conceptions of the afterlife. An analysis of the exemplum that provided the new custom with a “myth of origins” reveals carefully inserted allusions and symbolism, which together propound a coherent theology of eschatology, divine recompense, and intercessory prayer. This theology closely mirrors doctrinal developments underway in Christian Europe—specifically the “birth of purgatory” and its accompanying commemorative and intercessory practices. The exemplum, moreover, couches its message in subtly polemical terms, criticizing and ridiculing those very elements of Christian belief and practice that were being covertly incorporated into the Jewish liturgical realm.

This article examines three facets of R. Tuviah ben ’Eliʽezer's commentary, Lekaḥ tov, on Song of Songs: (a) his unique approach to allegorical interpretation; (b) his participation in Judeo-Christian polemics; and (c) the question of a connection between his commentary on Songs and Rashi's. R. Tuviah proposes to read the verses of Songs as simultaneously describing the past, the present, and the future of the Jewish nation, a type of reading that is extremely rare in rabbinic midrashim, which R. Tuviah adopts to create a systematic allegorical commentary. There are similarities between the interpretations of R. Tuviah and those of Rashi; while not numerous, all the same these two scholars were the first to propose a literal interpretation of Songs, they both engaged in similar Judeo-Christian polemic, and they interpreted Songs on the allegorical level in a similar fashion. These points of similarity support the possibility that Rashi was exposed to reports of R. Tuviah's commentary on Songs.

Earlier scholars typically considered the tannaitic traditions transmitted by Amoraim in the two Talmuds to be later amoraic (largely Babylonian) creations. This supposition was based on a range of formalistic considerations: the introductory terms, the attitude of the Amoraim to their halakhic content, and the lack of parallels in tannaitic literature. A study of the approximately 140 baraitot introduced by the term “a Tanna taught in front of so-and-so” offers substantial critique of this supposition, which was often based on incorrect a priori assumptions or on faulty interpretations of sources. Assessment of the nature and origins of the halakhic content of these so-called “amoraic baraitot” requires thorough analysis of the halakhic traditions found in this collection and their comparison with parallels in Palestinian tannaitic literature.

The Hebrew Bible's narrative style has impressed interpreters of many periods and perspectives with its powerful tension between fragmentary speech and meaningful silence, summed up in Erich Auerbach's famous thesis that the Akedah is “fraught with background.” But is it possible to give a coherent account of what the Bible does not say? This article offers a comparative critical analysis of attempts to do just that, starting with Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) and continuing through the contemporary work of James Kugel, Robert Alter, Meir Sternberg, Avivah Zornberg, and others. It claims that, rather than the text itself, the Bible's “background” serves as a metaphor by which the biblical critic navigates a complex relationship with her own normative construct of the reader's mind. This comparison concludes with practical considerations about its potential for research and teaching in biblical poetics, understood as rigorous intersubjective communication, rather than as either method or ideology.