This article will examine the development of Yavneh as a literary and cultural construct from tannaitic sources through the two versions of the story of the deposition of R. Gamliel, in Yerushalmi Berakhot 4:1 and Bavli Berakhot 27b–28a. It will explore the ways in which the talmudic storytellers present a more developed narrative world complete with a social and political culture. It will then analyze the complex relationships between the narrative worlds of the Yerushalmi and Bavli and their respective social and ideological contexts. Based on this analysis, I shall propose a model for understanding the way in which the Yavnehs of both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi functioned in amoraic and postamoraic society to create a nuanced and self-critical rabbinic cultural identity.

This article considers the role of the individual during crises in humanism and the ethical responsibility with which the individual is charged in such times of moral calamity. In a narrow sense, the article explores Emmanuel Lévinas's “Nameless” (“Sans nom”), an essay that appears in his book Proper Names, and proposes viewing it as his personal reading in honor of his unique, unaccounted-for teacher Monsieur Chouchani. From a broader philosophical perspective, the article attempts to consider the meaning of ethics and the assumption of responsibility in times when doing so appears to offer no benefit and hold no significance whatsoever. From an educational perspective, it endeavors to better understand the ethical role of the teacher in both tranquil and tempestuous times. And finally, it also offers another profound observation of what Lévinas's article refers to as the “Jewish condition,” not in a national historical sense but as a model of crisis-oriented ethical challenge.

The final passage of B. Ketubbot discusses the question of living and burial in the Land of Israel or Babylonia. This essay examines one unit within that passage featuring a debate between Rav Yehudah and R. Zeira regarding migration from Babylonia to the Land of Israel. The unit appears in two different locations in textual witnesses to the Talmud. Its migration and the particular points where it was incorporated suggest that its true place is as a satellite passage alongside the main one. This recognition correlates with other observations arising from an examination of the unit and its relationship to other parts of the passage and parallel sources, leading to the conclusion that though the main text discusses migration from Babylonia to the Land of Israel, this unit apparently has a different agenda: to legitimize the very existence of a Jewish center in Babylonia.

This paper offers a novel perspective regarding the interface between law, mysticism, and social reality. The inner turn that characterizes Hasidism is often understood through a binary model defined by the Christian Hebraists, and followed by many academic scholars, in which law and spirit exist in intractable tension. We suggest, however, that in the specific contexts of Hasidism, nomos, eros, and mystical piety often merged in distinctive ways, and that these are visible in novel forms of Jewish legal method and discourse. Our appreciation of the multifaceted Jewish religious and pietistic expressions of modernity should not be made to conform to the generally accepted definition of an era of strict “Orthodox” formulation and monolithic, conservative legal stagnation. Instead, we argue that the spiritual and legal ethos of Hasidism took on new forms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as local identities became increasingly complex and new cultural fusions led to creative re-expressions of law and theology.

R. Moses ben Naḥman (1194–1270), one of the most prominent rabbinic figures of medieval Spanish Jewry, wrote the majority of his works in Catalonia, and composed only a few isolated pieces after his move to ’Ereẓ Yisra'el three years before his death. This article examines one of his latest works—the prayer he delivered in Jerusalem on visiting its ruins in 1267. This lament over the city, which extols its majesty during its glory days, also reflects the place the temple occupied in Naḥmanides's religious thought. This article presents an earlier version of the prayer that was probably written during the heyday of his career in Catalonia. A close analysis of the changes Naḥmanides made to it after his move to ’Ereẓ Yisra'el reveals changes in his perception of the temple, perhaps also shedding light on some of the motives behind his decision to move to ’Ereẓ Yisra'el at the end of his life.