With this issue, we launch our joint editorship of the AJS Review. It is therefore an appropriate moment to share with our readers our hopes and expectations for the intellectual direction of the journal. Some of what follows has already been articulated in a statement published in the AJS Perspectives (Spring/Summer, 2003) shortly after we assumed our tasks. We feel it bears repeating here for the sake of those who may not have seen the original article.

Back in 1993, as senior librarian at the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, Ukraine, in charge of cataloguing a newly uncovered Judaica collection, I came across an enigmatic manuscript entitled Sefer ha-ḥeshek. It did not match the bulk of the Judaica holdings. Nor did it fit in Abraham Harkavy's collection of medieval manuscripts. It was too Ashkenazic for Abraham Firkovich's Karaite papers, and too early for most of S. Ansky's nineteenth-century folkloric materials. The manuscript had a wooden cover, separate from the text, with a copper monogram Sefer ha-ḥeshek in Hebrew (hereafter—SH). SH's title appears randomly as a running head; the author occasionally refers to the title of the manuscript. Primarily because of its size—411 folios, 23 of them blank, some 760 filled pages altogether—and due to its magical contents, I discarded any attempts to identify the manuscript as a version of the well-known Sefer ha-ḥeshek, a twenty-or-so-page kabbalistic treatise on the names of the archangel Metatron attributed to Isaac Luria. Also, since the manuscript is not a commentary on the book of Isaiah or Proverbs, it could neither be Solomon Duran's nor Solomon ha-Levi's Ḥ eshek shelomoh.

In her path-breaking study of Israeli women's fiction, Yael Feldman concludes her analysis of Ruth Almog's Roots of Air (1987) with an insightful observation. In this major work, Feldman claims, Almog trespassed into the male writers' territory and became the first among Israeli woman writers to produce an autobiographical fiction of the “portrait of an artist as a young girl.” Feldman concludes that, once the stage of “therapeutic” self-examination, which encompasses “both the oedipal fixation and the daughter–mother identification,” has been completed, “Almog has now embraced the mother in herself.” Indeed, Feldman identifies the next stage in Almog's artistic evolution in her collection of stories, Artistic Mending (1993), suggesting that now the story of another has become the focus of Almog's artistic concern. In Artistic Mending the writer turns her “motherly” attention to life stories of children, mainly second-generation Holocaust survivors, seeking ways to understand, but also “mend” the damaging effects of the tragic historical legacy.

Among contemporary literary theorists—and in the humanities in general—theological approaches toward interpretation have been dismissed in favor of hermeneutic models committed to the contingency, partiality, and historicity of all interpretative practice. Against the grain of this tendency, which tends to dismiss all vestiges of theology from postmodern habits of reading and interpretation, critics like Daniel Boyarin and David Stern, have, over the past decades, attempted to recover the distinctly Jewish modes and discourses of reading and interpretation. In the process, they have, as Boyarin himself underlines, introduced a specifically Jewish mode of reading—that of midrash—into the literary theoretical canon.

In this paper I will examine the rabbinic exemption of women from the obligation to perform any “positive time-bound commandment” (), as it appears in M. Kiddushin 1:7. This rule states that women are exempt from the obligation to perform those commandments, such as, for example, sitting in a Sukkah on the Feast of Tabernacles, or saying the kriءat shemעa, the declaration of God's Oneness, morning and evening, in which the requirement for the mandated action comes about with the arrival of a specific time. I offer this analysis of a particular rabbinic ruling, in its literary context in the Mishnah, as a case study in what I claim to be a major component of the rabbinic discourse of gender: the male appropriation of the “feminine” into their own identities, and the resultant exclusion of women from those areas of appropriation. In this paper I will employ a literary/anthropological approach to reading the Mishnah, which I believe is very useful in uncovering such underlying cultural patterns within its succinct, legal writing style.

Science and faith were inextricably intertwined in the Latin Middle Ages. Clerics would attend to both spiritual and physical needs because the need to care for the body coincided with the need to care for the soul. Until the rise of universities in the twelfth century, monasteries were the centers of scientific knowledge. And, even after the professionalization of medicine in the thirteenth century, Christian physicians continued to look to the Bible, in addition to their license, as the source of their authority. Indeed, many Christian physicians who received medical degrees went on to pursue higher degrees in theology. It is therefore not surprising that several Christian theologians used medical theories in the service of theology.

If quantity is any measure of importance, then Isaac Abarbanel/Abravanel—the fascinating statesman and financier, polemicist and messianic theorist, exegete and philosopher-theologian—has certainly risen very high indeed in the study of medieval Jewish thought. Although never an obscure figure in modern scholarship, having already been the subject of several monographs and dozens of articles, the publication of three books in as many years moves him closer to his more respected predecessors: Maimonides, Gersonides, and Crescas. That there is little overlap in these new books, moreover, which approach the extensive and diverse corpus of Abarbanel's writing in very different ways, shows that this interest in his writings is more than a passing fad. Lawee and Feldman, in particular, not only introduce the reader to various aspects of Abarbanel's life and thought, but point to new areas of research that deserve further investigation. Like any good scholarship, not only do they summarize and synthesize, connecting particular details to larger themes and concerns, but they also challenge conventional views, forcing the reader to return to the sources themselves to look afresh at the writings of this medieval master.

The Keepers is a concise and informative introduction to the history and religion of the Samaritans, that branch of the Israelite–Jewish religion that has endured from antiquity to the present among a tiny minority in Palestine and Israel. The book is written in an engaging style that will appeal to a public that would not read specialized works on the subject. At the same time, the information contained in the work is reliable and the authors are careful in their discussions of unsolved (and often unsolvable) issues. In an epilogue, Anderson and Giles underline that there remains a “host of unanswered questions about the history and culture of the Samaritan community” and that this book is “only a beginning” (p. 145).

Baskin's book should be required reading, along with the works of Neusner, Boyarin, Wegner, Hauptman, Brooten, and Kraemer, for those interested in Jewish women in late antiquity. It is methodologically sophisticated, yet not jargonistic or overly determined by method or theory. Its limitations are a result of the characteristics of the rabbinic documents, notoriously difficult to use for a comprehensive study on any topic; the vastness and variety of editorial styles of the rabbinic corpus virtually assure that one will both miss relevant data and confront an unmanageable variety of opinions on any given topic.

This book contains a full review of Jewish marriage in antiquity, beginning with biblical injunctions, but focusing primarily on postbiblical material and specifically on rabbinic literature. It is divided into three parts: 1. Thinking about Marriage, in which Satlow describes how and why Jewish marriages were planned, 2. Marrying, in which he describes the process of marriage itself, and 3. Staying Married, in which married life and its consequences are at issue. In each of these parts Satlow correctly attempts to draw a line between the ideals of marriage as portrayed in the sources and what actually went on, as far as these allow us a glimpse of reality.

Alexander Samely, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Manchester University, has written what I would describe as one of the most detailed and precise descriptions of the Mishnah's use of scriptural sources. His book, The Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, a fifteen-chapter work with a glossary of important rabbinic and linguistic terms, two appendices, an excellent bibliography, and thorough indices shows the work of a meticulous scholar and incisive and insightful reader of the Bible and mishnaic corpus.

This book discusses cults surrounding sainted figures in Islam, and secondarily in Judaism, from many points of view. It urges researchers to go beyond “the traditional methods of interpreting Jewish and Islamic texts,” and to probe the “human dimension of spirituality.” It maintains that studying the practices, beliefs, and idiosyncratic deeds directed to sainted personages—both alive and dead—allows us to explore spiritual paths along which we meet the poor as well as the powerful, and both the theologian and the unschooled believer.

The two books before us expand the horizons of Maimonidean studies, on the divergent planes of literature and politics. James Diamond's study of Maimonides' use of the Bible and midrash is a tour de force of literary analysis, while Menachem Lorberbaum offers in part a view of Maimonides' attitude to political authority of considerable relevance today.

Professor Jose Luis Lacave collected thirty ketubot (marriage contracts) from various medieval Hispanic kingdoms. These ketubot were found in different libraries and archives. Most of the documents have been published before, some of them by Lacave himself. Three are published here for the first time.

It is perhaps unorthodox to begin a book review by citing something from the acknowledgments. In this case, however, I think it is quite apt. Describing his early foray into the study of Jewish mysticism, Lawrence Fine writes, “It was [Alexander] Altmann who said to me, in one of the earliest conversations I had with him after I arrived at Brandeis, that ‘nobody understands Lurianic Kabbala, not even Scholem,’ referring, of course to the preeminent historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.” It is a comment, I imagine, that Scholem may have even agreed with! In any case, Fine's book is an attempt, and one of the best to date, to try to make sense of the labyrinthine world of Lurianic Kabbala. Scholem argued that Lurianic metaphysics was a system developed as a response to historical phenomena, that is, the Jewish expulsion from Spain, and was largely a creative interpretation of, and commentary on, the Zohar. Neither Scholem nor his student Isaiah Tishby devoted any significant space to the historical context of Lurianic Kabbala or its particular cultural milieu, or the possibility of external influences on this mystical circle. Both assumed Luria had historiosophic and not cultural/historic concerns. This trajectory has, until recently, been the accepted framework of Lurianic scholarship.

Can medieval Jewish poetry teach us history? Asked differently, can scholars draw on medieval poetry (piyyutim) to reconstruct historical events? In Beautiful Death, Einbinder narrows down this matter to the case of Ashkenazic martyrological poetry. To answer this question, Einbinder has analyzed over seventy Hebrew poems from northern France, England, and Germany; they span the period following the First Crusade (1096), ending with the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 in Germany and King Philip IV's expulsion of the French Jews in 1306.

Considerable attention has been focused on Habsburg Jewry, especially the Jews of Vienna, before World War I. Several works have also dealt with the Jews of Austria and the other Habsburg successor states during the interwar years. Until now, no books have explored in depth the experiences of Austrian Jewry during the First World War. This past year, however, two books, Marsha L. Rozenblit's Reconstructing National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I and David Rechter's The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, appeared to fill this lacuna in the scholarly literature. Although these books cover the same period and share much the same material, their scope and approach are very different.

This is a translation and slight modification of Dat ve-Ziyyonut: Imutim Rishonim (1990), a Hebrew collection of articles previously published by Yosef Salmon. In this English volume, some sections of the Hebrew edition were omitted, some were altered, and two recent articles were added. The thirteen articles address the period from 1818 (the writings of Hatam Sofer) until 1922 (the founding of Ha-Poءel ha-Mizrachi) and ask how religious Jews—especially those who were drawn toward the hope of restoring the Jewish people to Zion—dealt with the challenges presented by the increasingly secular Jewish national movement. This question is at the center of Salmon's body of research on East European Zionism.

In the last decade or so, new research on Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany has pushed the traditional boundaries of “Holocaust studies” (1933–1945) toward the postwar period. Indeed, the displaced persons or “DP” experience—the temporary settlement in Germany of the Sheءerith Hapleitah (“Surviving Remnant”) from the liberation of concentration camps in the spring of 1945 to the late 1940s—provides important insights into post-Holocaust Jewish life. The impact of trauma and loss, the final divorce between Jews and East-Central Europe through migration to Israel and the New World, the rise of Zionist consciousness, the shaping of a Jewish national collective in transit, the regeneration of Jewish demography and culture in the DP camps, and the relationships between Jews and Germans in occupied Germany are some of the many themes explored by recent DP historiography—by now a subfield of postwar Jewish history.

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).