It has long been a truism that the Tosefta serves as a major source of tannaitic material for both Talmuds. One corollary of this view is that the toseftan versions of baraitot (hereafter, “toseftan baraitot”)1 are, barring the usual vagaries of transmissional difficulties, closer to the original tannaitic texts than those found in the Yerushalmi, and certainly the Bavli.Linguistically speaking, this understanding of the place of the Tosefta in early rabbinic literature underlies the assignment (without much analysis!) of the Tosefta, along with the Mishnah, to the earlier stratum of Middle Hebrew (= Mishnaic Hebrew), mhe1 (= Middle Hebrew A).

In the early stages of the modern rewriting of medieval Jewish history, the sources most consulted and adduced were narrative. As the enterprise has matured, further source genres have been discovered and utilized, thus allowing for improved understanding of the medieval Jewish experience. Of late, the reliability of narrative sources has come under question, but at the same time these narrative sources have been utilized in new and creative ways. To be sure, both the questioning and the innovative utilization of medieval Jewish narrative sources have been profoundly influenced by similar tendencies among general medievalists, as they seek to refine their tools of historical reconstruction.

The struggle for Jewish emancipation in Germany is commonly understood as a battle for civic equality at the state level. But an important chapter in the history of emancipation took place in the conflict between German states and localities over Jewish rights. Jurisdictional battles over Jewish status may seem quintessentially medieval, recalling the strife between competing levels of the feudal hierarchy for control of the Jews and the revenue they generated.Yet similar struggles persisted well into the nineteenth century in several German states, such as Bavaria, Baden, and Wiirt-temberg, where central governments were weak and localities exercised significant degrees of self-rule.

A discussion of the emergence of a modern Jewish collective consciousness in Eastern Europe does not require us to address the question of the beginnings of a movement, which also has an organizational aspect. The phenomenon under discussion—at least in its initial stage—was not organized; there were no membership cards, bylaws, or party conferences. It is my contention, however, that the emergence of a Jewish nationalist movement was connected to, and dependent upon, the prior emergence of a collective consciousness.Thus, on the one hand, our discussion is not based upon the phenomenological definition of nationalism, which is not a simple matter, while, on the other hand, we view the institutionalized nationalist movement as a consequence of a process of consciousness-building. Mine is a syncretic approach, the advantage of which is that it does not observe a historical process from an intellectual or theoretical point of reference foreign to the process.

In 1920, a brief but fatal battle between Arabs and Jews took place at the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in the northern Galilee. The defense of Tel Hai soon became a landmark in the history of Israeli society. The story of Tel Hai was regarded as a major symbolic text of the pioneering ethos and an important step toward the development of a new national Hebrew culture. Highlighting the theme of collective death and rebirth, Tel Hai offered a modern, secular text that sanctified the new nation and dramatized the emergence of a new type of Jew. For the Jewish pioneers in Palestine, Tel Hai embodied the ideals of settlement and defense, providing a concrete example of their resolute determination to hold on to new settlements at all costs.The present study examines the role of Tel Hai as a national myth, name-ly, a symbolic narrative relating to an important event in the nation's past that embodies sacred national values and is used as a charter for political action.1 Following Halbwachs's pioneering approach to the study of collective memory,2 this article explores the meaning of Tel Hai as it was constructed in public discourse, focusing upon two periods of conflict within Israeli society. Thus it is not a historical study of the event that took place at Tel Hai in 1920, but a study of how this event has been remembered and reinterpreted in Israeli culture.

Gudrun Krämer's study on the Jews of Egypt is divided into five sections: Communal Structure and Composition; Communal Organization; Socioeconomic and Political Change (1914–1918); Jewish Reactions to Political Change: Egyptian Patriotism, Communism, and Zionism; and The Beginning of the End: Egyptianization, the Arab-Israeli War, and the Burning of Cairo.