In 883 CE, a man appeared in Kairouan, one of the centers of Jewish life at the time and told a tale about the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom. He called himself Eldad and claimed to be from the tribe of Dan. Since then, the story of the Ten Lost Tribes—that the tribes of the Northern Kingdom still exist intact in a faraway land, living in exile beyond the sabbatical river, a mysterious body of water that was passable only on the Sabbath—has continued to generate excitement. It is astonishing, however, to realize that this motif did not develop until many centuries after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. After the destruction of the Northern Kingdom, many northerners remained in their ancestral homeland in the north. Other northerners lived among their southern compatriots in Judah after fleeing south, while deported northerners and southerners mingled in exile in Mesopotamia. It is only after the end of the Second Temple period that the notion of the Ten Lost Tribes, inviolable and unreachable, developed.

Some time in the second half of the eighteenth century, there emerged a Jewish legend that glorified a conversion to Judaism and a martyr's death of a Polish noble from a very prominent Polish aristocratic family, sometimes referred to as Walentyn Potocki, or Graf Potocki—the legend of ger ẓedek, a righteous convert, of Wilno. The story was enthusiastically embraced by Eastern European Jews, and it subsequently became a subject of numerous novels and novellas. Even today its appeal continues. It is currently mentioned on a number of Jewish web sites as “a true story of a Polish Hrabia (count) . . . who descended from a long line of noble Christian rulers and who sacrificed wealth and power to convert from Christianity to Judaism,” and it serves as a basis for school plays in some Ḥaredi schools for girls. Although converts to Judaism were not unheard of in the premodern era, few stories of this kind emerged. Rabbinic authorities had an ambiguous attitude toward non-Jewish conversions, and few encouraged proselytizing or glorified non-Jewish converts. The legend of ger ẓedek of Wilno, though said to be a true story, appears to be a carefully crafted tale of conversion, a polemical and apologetic response to a number of challenges that the Polish Jewish community faced from the mid-eighteenth century.

Joseph Perl's two epistolary novels, published in 1819 and 1838, far surpass typical Hebrew prose from the early nineteenth century. The leading Enlightenment authors (the maskilim) were deliberate epigones, because they favored the rhetorical modes called shibuẓ and meliẓah. By imitating the Hebrew of the Prophets—under the influence of the ornate style known from medieval Spain—the Berlin Enlightenment authors and their followers strove for what they considered to be “pure language” (leshon ẓaḥ). Their preference for allusion and quotation encouraged epigonism and made originality a lesser priority; many Berlin maskilim valued the adherence to norms more than original self-expression. The epitome of that devotion to literary norms was the genre of the Briefsteller, exemplified by Buchner's and Naiman's works, which taught Jews how to write polite German or Hebrew letters and sound like cultivated, well-educated Europeans.

Throughout the Talmudic era, the Jewish community of Babylonia lived under Persian rule while Zoroastrianism, serving as a state religion, was enjoying something of a renaissance. In Babylonia, known in the later geographical literature as the Persian heartland, Jews lived alongside Persians. Babylonian Jews had also already experienced Persian rule for centuries prior to the Talmudic era under the Achaemenids, and later under the persianized Arsacid dynasty. This alone should have sufficed to lure a number of scholars into exploring various cross-cultural contacts between the two neighboring religious communities during this period. Until recently, however, scholarship has not been greatly drawn to this field, despite an exhaustive focus, of venerable antiquity, on the relationship between Israel and Persia in the biblical and Second Temple periods, including the Qumran library.

Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden of 1781 is generally believed to be the first call issued in Germany for the improvement of the Jews' civil rights. This commonly held belief is mistaken. Following in the footsteps of Volkmar Eichstädt's Bibliographie zur Geschichte der Judenfrage of 1938, Jacob Toury called attention to the Schreiben eines Juden an einen Philosophen nebst der Antwort (in what follows: Schreiben), a pamphlet published anonymously in Berlin in 1753, which is “the first German composition on the Jewish question” calling for complete equality of the status of the Jews in Germany. Toury shed important light on this work but was unable to identify its author. Subsequent historiography took little notice of the Schreiben, perhaps because its author, and hence the context in which it was composed, remained unidentified. In this article, I show that the author of the Schreiben is the Berlin physician and early maskil Aaron Salomon Gumpertz, also known as Aaron Zalman Emmerich (1723–1769) and that his friend, the noted poet, playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), was directly involved in its publication. This identification should give Gumpertz and his Schreiben the place they deserve in German history and in the history of the Jews in Germany; at the same time, it enhances our appreciation of Lessing as a central figure in promoting the rights of Jews in Germany.

Among the stranger assertions made by Werner Sombart in The Jews and Modern Capitalism was that “it can be proved with great certainty that the Jew's freedom from the evil effects of alcohol (as also from syphilis) is due to his religion.” Yet, the Jewish religion, unlike Islam, never prohibited alcohol per se, and even when “kosher” wine—untouched by gentiles—was in short supply, beer or more potent beverages could be found by those so inclined. More to the point is S. D. Goitein's trenchant remark in the final (and posthumously published) volume of his A Mediterranean Society that “the proverbial sobriety of East European immigrants to the United States should not be taken as inherent to the genes of the race.” Although Maimonides in his Guide memorably described “gatherings with a view to drinking intoxicants” as “more shameful than gatherings of naked people . . . who excrete in daylight sitting together,” he was clearly speaking there more as philosopher than halakhist. In the medieval “Geniza society” in which he lived, as we learn from Goitein, all “important matters, such as sending a son overseas or promising a bequest, would be arranged at a drinking bout.”

The purpose of Wright's study is to trace “the evolution of the depictions of Baruch ben Neriah . . . from the biblical materials through the early Jewish and Christian texts and traditions that either mention Baruch or were allegedly written by him” (xi). The book succeeds admirably. In three main chapters, Wright collects and analyzes most of the material about Baruch from the first mention of him in Jeremiah as the prophet's scribal assistant to works as late as 3 Baruch that picture him as a recipient of apocalyptic visions. A fourth chapter contains traditions about Baruch in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources into the Middle Ages.

Genocide, a neologism coined during World War II and now enshrined in international law, reflects an ancestral phenomenon as old as human history, if not older. It is a secularized version of what our predecessors understood by holy war, just war, and jihad as divine sanctions of murder and mayhem. The twentieth century anachronistically has applied the term to the Armenian massacres of World War I, and the United Nations today struggles how not to apply its definition to similar actions such as the tragic events in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Sudan, let alone threats of mass terrorist murder by a bevy of religious killers. While our contemporary market is nearly saturated with books on the rebirth of jihad in its current terrorist manifestation, and a number of studies have examined the biblical antecedents of genocide, Louis Feldman offers a unique perspective on several ancient rereadings of a revered text that can be read as potentially genocidal.

David Noy has labored in the past decade to update J. B. Frey's Corpus inscriptionum iudaicarum (vol. 1 [Rome 1936; revised by B. Lifshitz, New York, 1975]; vol. 2 [Rome, 1952]). He has already produced two volumes on the North Mediterranean (the Balkans and southern Italy, 1993, and Rome, 1995) and another for Greco-Roman Egypt (with William Horbury, 1992).

In the present study, Hindy Najman addresses two fundamental aspects related to Second Temple Jewish literature: pseudepigrapha and the rewritten Bible. Pseudepigrapha as a literary genre signifies texts which claim as their author some privileged individual from the past. In reality, however, the attribution of authorship to some ancient figure masks the present-day composition of the text. The term rewritten Bible, in its broadest use, refers to the interpretive reworking of the scriptural text and story through such means as expansion, deletion, harmonization, and conflation. The final product retains the narrative sequence of the scriptural account though in a significantly modified form. Both of these literary techniques seemingly have at their base a manipulation and subversion of the integrity of the scriptural story and text. Pseudepigrapha asserts for a latter day author the authority and prestige of an ancient figure; rewritten Bible presents itself as a new and improved scripture.

Chapter 1 introduces Jacobs' methodology. He summarizes the main critical approaches to Jerusalem as a Christian Holy Land in the fourth to the sixth centuries, and outlines the purpose and usefulness of postcolonial criticism as applied to the Christian writings and geography. The book is laid out thematically and at times in sequence, reflecting the central premise of the book, that “the colonizer and colonized cannot remain fixed binary subjects in the perpetually shifting contest of power and identity” (9).

Kessler's erudite book aims to prove not only that exegetical encounters occurred between the ancient rabbis and the early church fathers in both directions, but also that “to understand properly Jewish or Christian exegesis in late antiquity it is essential to understand each other's interpretations and the influence of one upon the other” (182). He begins by reviewing the shortcomings of previous approaches to Jewish–Christian interaction in late antiquity. Kessler then puts forward what he terms the exegetical approach, suggests some controls on this method, and proceeds to test his hypothesis by conducting a verse-by-verse examination of Genesis 22. In each chapter, he first surveys a few major early interpreters, such as Philo and Josephus, and then compares Rabbinic and early Christian interpretations on Genesis 22 in some detail. There is also a final chapter that examines ancient artistic renderings of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.

Cynthia Baker's Rebuilding the House of Israel is one of a handful of studies that seek to interpret Jewish culture during late antiquity by setting rabbinic sources and archaeological remains from the Land of Israel in dialogue. Baker is a careful and perceptive reader of both the primary tannaitic sources that she discusses and of the material record. In fact, the body of the book, in which she discusses the domestic context (well titled “The Well-Ordered Bayit: Bodies, Houses and Rabbis in the Ancient Galilee”) and the marketplace (“Men, Women and the Shuk: Cultural Currencies on the Open Market”) is a well-written description and analysis of the preserved evidence. Baker shows, for example, that rabbinic notions of privacy and the placement of windows within extant structures reflect similar interests. More important, she shows the ways that various spaces, both public and private, were used by ancient Jewish women, and how gender issues played out within environments constructed by Jewish men and women in Roman Palestine. The impetus for this study was not ultimately Rabbinic literature or archaeology, however. It is what Baker sees as a misconception in recent scholarship. Baker argues against a position whereby Jewish women in antiquity were starkly limited to the domestic realm, while the public realm (and even elements of the private) were reserved for men.

About 35,000 books and articles have been published thus far on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). The vast majority deal with the literature found in the eleven caves in the vicinity of Qumran and only a few deal with the archaeological remains of Khirbet Qumran nearby. The site was exhaustively excavated a few times in the past fifty-four years. The first that also determined the nature of its interpretation was carried out during 1951 to 1956 by Fr. Roland de Vaux from the French school of biblical studies at Jerusalem, the Ecole Biblique. Most of the site was unearthed during this excavation. The latest excavations were carried out in the past ten years and thus far with extremely meager publications.

In this bold and ambitious book, Rachel Elior seeks to trace the early history of Jewish mysticism, from biblical through rabbinic times. In the course of ten chapters, the author covers a wide range of material, with special attention devoted to Ezekiel, 1 Enoch, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and of course the Hekhalot texts. While not all scholars will be convinced by the analysis presented here, one should welcome this latest installment in the author's wide-ranging and creative efforts to understand better the origins and later developments of Jewish mysticism.

Jewish mystical and magical texts are remarkably relevant to some of the most central historiographical themes of early modern Europe; they are also remarkably esoteric and confounding to any nonspecialist. Providing a remedy to this incongruity, J. H. Chajes makes a major contribution to both Jewish and general early modern historiography with his first book, on Jewish spirit possession and exorcism. His work offers a useful narrative of the development of Jewish exorcism traditions, presenting the complex subject in terms that make it more approachable without over-simplification. At the same time, Chajes lends the material depth and relevance through sensitive analysis of the chronologically and geographically local circumstances of the most significant early modern treatments of the phenomenon. The appendix alone would be an offering of some significance, consisting of eleven original translations of early modern accounts of spirit possession, and this quality of presenting important raw material runs throughout the volume. Competent and detailed legwork is evident in the exposition of various exorcists' techniques from the ancient world and Middle Ages, through Luria's unique methods in sixteenth-century Safed, and up to later seventeenth-century attitudes to possession and demonology. Much of this material is in the first chapter, “The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession,” which argues that “there was something new in the sixteenth century” as a long percolation of diverse traditions culminated in the formation of the “classic” view of the dybbuk in a period of unprecedented frequency of possession and exorcism events.

Christopher Browning is perhaps most widely known for his seminal study of the motives of the “ordinary men” who perpetrated the systematic murder of European Jewry at the behest of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, in the past two decades he has devoted much of his attention to studying the processes and decisions that led the Reich to make systematic mass murder its official policy and to provide the impetus and means for its implementation. Now he has brought his empirical findings and interpretations together in a single volume that provides the most rigorous, cogent, and lucid analysis currently available of this crucial problem in the history of the encounter between Nazi Germany and the Jews.

Immediately following his acknowledgments, Cohen begins his volume with an invitation that aims to evoke our interest in the Jews of St. Thomas. This chapter structure—in which the volume commences with what is in essence a justification for its publication—elicits an intriguing question about the study of Jewish life. Cohen is asking us to consider why one should be interested in this (and by implication, any?) small community of Jews. His subsequent introductory chapter poses a second fundamental question. It asks whether, in an age in which prevailing historical models have been subject to critical reexamination, a history that is organized by chronology rather than by theme can have scholarly value. The core of his response to these questions is that the St. Thomas Jewish community is an unusual instance of “accumulative ethnicity” (xxii) and thus constitutes a pattern in Jewish ethnicity worthy of scholarly attention. The narrative is arranged in chronological sequence to convey this pattern. Its unfolding temporal structure allows the reader to watch Jewish ethnicities emerge both from, and in place of one another. In raising these questions, Cohen brings a reflexive stance to the narrative. Yet, socially constructed memory seems to lie at the heart of the notion of accumulative ethnicity. Most Jews currently living on St. Thomas are transplants from the American mainland. Might the volume's framework also represent an American search for roots, and for roots that are special?

In the early modern and modern periods, the occupational profile of Jews in the West diverged dramatically from that of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Commerce, rather than agriculture or artisanal or industrial manufacturing, provided the arena in which Jews labored to make a living. From an economic perspective, this was not a problem. It did not place Jews at a competitive disadvantage. Indeed, the opposite was true. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption, buying and selling was more profitable than tolling in a field, workshop, or factory. Having been forced into a narrow range of occupations earlier in their history, Jews in the West now found themselves in an advantageous position economically. However, for Gentiles, who rarely viewed Jews in a disinterested light, the Jewish distinctive occupational profile was problematic and often viewed as symptomatic of a more profound pathology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Jews becoming citizens of the states in which they lived and moving rapidly into the middle class, their economic distinctiveness became a central feature of the debate about their fate and future, what was known at the time as the “Jewish Question.”

In his Kabbalah: New Perspectives, Moshe Idel envisioned a reordering of scholarly inquiry into Kabbalah, in which the intellectual divisions between the world of the traditional kabbalists and academic scholars would be bridged. The writings of Moshe Halamish, while not conceived with the specific purpose of fulfilling such a mandate, nonetheless create a realm of discourse in which traditional models are, at least, not outraged. Halamish writes in such a way that a dialogue with the traditional purveyors of Kabbalah may be at least envisioned.