The messianic dream owes its roots to biblical prophecy and its rich development to generations of sensitive and creative exegetes anxiously awaiting redemption. Scripture itself is less than generous in providing detailed information about the end of days, so ungenerous, in fact, that some modern scholars have expressed skepticism about the very appearance of a messianic figure in the biblical text. While this skepticism is excessive, it reflects a reality which troubled the ancients no less than the moderns and left room for the diversity and complexity that mark the messianic idea by late antiquity.

A storehouse of narratives can be found within the literature which emerged from and gave expression to the spiritual developments in sixteenth-century Safed. These include legends, moral tales and exempla, anecdotes, and parables which can be garnered from the volumes of the kabbalistic ethical works and other literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. In this study we shall seek to explore two such narratives of that period, stories which, while quite different from one another in character, both draw upon much earlier narrative traditions which have been subtly but radically remolded. The immediate aim of tracing the prehistory of these two stories and their routes of metamorphosis and of comparing the Safed stories with the sources which lie behind them is to clarify the literary and historical significance of the two narratives in the precise form which they acquired in the Safed experience. On a broader scale, such exploration might serve to exemplify the transformation of narrative traditions under the impact of a worldview and a cultural-spiritual milieu.

Religious thought and observance almost never exist in a self-contained vacuum but are rather influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by their social and ideological surroundings. A study of the spiritual life of early Victorian Jewry provides a good example of this law of history and shows how a Jewish community's religious beliefs and actions can be shaped and even dominated by the influence of its Gentile host society. An analysis of early Victorian Judaism is really an investigation into the social dynamics of the London community and a study of how the endeavors of its various factions to adapt to the mid-nineteenth-century English world affected its religious life.

Within the steadily growing body of fiction written by David Shahar over the past three decades, his trilogy of novels, The Palace of Shattered Vessels, stands out as his most remarkable achievement to date. It is a complex, often puzzling work, steeped in the spirit of Jerusalem, in which it is set, bold in the narrative techniques it employs, and ambitious in its thematic aspirations a meandering stream of fragmented memories flowing through the mind of its unnamed narrator. As the flow continues, these fragments gradually cohere into broad arcs of interlocking narrative circles that effect a vivid evocation of Jerusalem and its inhabitants as they were in the early decades of this century. But The Palace of Shattered Vessels aims at being much more than a memorial tribute to a nearly forgotten era in a rapidly changing city.