Following the lead of Spinoza, most of us have come to regard the sequence of Hebrew narrative from Genesis through Kings as a unified literary composition. It tells the story of Israel and its God from the creation of sky and land through the exile of Israel from its particular land. Although the anonymous narrator focuses on the fate of his people, he virtually always tries to identify with YHWH's point of view. For this reason, and possibly others, the narrator submerges his own identify and background. Unlike his near-contemporary Herodotus, who begins his Histories by introducing himself and his explicit agenda, the Hebrew author speaks from a perspective as wide as the cosmos. He would seem to assume the authority of God and give voice to a divinely certified account of his people's historical experience to (one assumes) his own community.

As Jacob Neusner and others have argued, before talmudic stories can be evaluated as historical evidence we must ask who the original authors were, what were their motives, and who was their intended audience. Even once we obtain the “original” version of a story, we do not necessarily have access to the historical event which gave rise to the story. For perhaps accounts of the historical event have been colored, even distorted beyond recognition, by the needs, desires, and beliefs of the original authors. Or perhaps the stories they transmit are fabrications, invented by students or later editors with a particular goal in mind.

For several years I have been trying to analyze Muslim historical thinking and the manner in which it affected perceptions of the Jewish past a past which Muslims fully appropriated as part of their own historical experiences and world-view. Put somewhat differently, I have been trying to understand the process by which a heritage common to both monotheistic faiths could and did become a bone of contention as well as a basis of mutual understanding. This linkage between Muslim self-reflection and the creation of a larger monotheist historiography is crucial to the formation of Muslim attitudes toward “the other,” the polemical discourse against Jews and Judaism, and, more generally, Muslim-Jewish relations throughout the Middle Ages. The present study is culled from a project on Muslim uses of the Jewish past.

My aim in this essay is to analyze a section of Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem largely ignored by previous readers. The treatise has generally been recognized as epochal in the history of modern Judaism, and Altmann, Guttmann, Rawidowicz, and Rotenstreich have therefore focused quite understandably on that which made it so: the novel political theory set forth in part 1, or the controversial assertion near the start of part 2 that Judaism “knows of no revealed religion” in the common sense of that term, its uniqueness consisting only in the “divine legislation” revealed to the Jews at Sinai. Only Heinemann has made a serious attempt to unravel Mendels sohn's tortuous explanation of the “divine legislation” as “a kind of living script,” and his often excellent account is marred by explicit Orthodox apologetic and utter reverence for Mendelssohn, both of which prevent him from seeing just how radical a theory of the commandments Jerusalem sets forth.3 Mendelssohn coyly terms most of the section devoted to this theory a “digression.“ Altmann notes charitably that it contains not only “some flights of speculation” but “the least substantiated of all [the] theories Mendelssohn ever advanced.”

Y. L. Teller's poetry underwent radical transformations in the 1930s, and its shifting forms were representative of the age. Influenced by the introspectivists, Teller excluded proper names, identifiable places, and definite time from his early poems. By the end of the decade, however, he had developed a style that drew heavily from news reports. The relationship between poetry and journalism became a matter of dispute in American Yiddish literature during these years, when Arn Glants-Leyeles and Yankev Glatshteyn were among the leading poets who dirtied their hands with news-print.