This article proposes a new set of critical historical practices, with the aim of constructing Jewishness into an interpretive historical mode. Jewish history is most commonly understood as the history of the Jewish people and its territories. In setting this as the foundation of Jewish history, scholars have allowed empirical evaluation of the Jewishness of a person or place to precede analysis. Two basic approaches, clearly foundational and tied to personalist and nationalist conceptions of Jewishness, have guided the field of Jewish history: the conjunctive and contingent. A third method—termed here a critical constructive approach—offers a nonfoundational vision for freeing Jewishness and Jewish history from tests of individual, group, or nationalist verifiability and, instead, reconceiving Jewishness as a structuring mode that can affect how a broad range of subjects have operated within history.

In 1970, the PLO Research Center in Beirut published a book that challenged what it considered to be common Arab misconceptions and prejudices concerning the Talmud. In analyzing this book, this article poses three questions. The first concerns motivation: What led the PLO's think tank to engage a researcher with the task of learning and writing about the Talmud? Second is the question of sources: How did the PLO researcher find his information and what does the presence of these sources on the PLO Research Center library's bookshelf tell us about the world of PLO intellectuals in late 1960s Beirut? Finally, what can be learned from the conclusions the researcher drew about the relationship between the Talmud and Zionism and between Judaism and Jewish nationalism? The article concludes with a reflection on the continuing debate over the place of antisemitism in the PLO.

This article examines the reception of rabbinic literature in South Korea, focusing on a series of books titled Talmud (T'almudŭ). We analyze dozens of volumes published between 1979 and 2016, identifying the subgenres that have been produced, individual editions that exemplify the development and diversity of the editions, and the religious traditions—Jewish, Confucian, and Christian—with which these books engage. The article also reflects on the place and significance of these Korean texts in the long reception of rabbinic literature.

In one passage of the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides explicitly forbids Jews from philosophical inquiry or even freethinking. This prohibition apparently includes a ban on reading or thinking about the topics of the Guide of the Perplexed. This paper argues that Maimonides's Mishneh Torah presents a consistent rejection of open philosophical inquiry. However, what is prohibited in the Mishneh Torah is not only permitted in the Guide, but the terms of the prohibition can be used as an outline of the structure of the Guide. That is to say, the Guide in a sense covers precisely the topics whose inquiry is forbidden to Jews in the Mishneh Torah. In the Mishneh Torah Maimonides does not suggest a punishment in this world for freethinkers, but in the Guide he punishes freethinkers with more study, especially metaphysical inquiry. It is possible that the Guide itself is the punishment for freethinking as defined by the Mishneh Torah. This kind of intellectual punishment has a parallel in Plato's Laws, where freethinkers are sentenced to spend five years living in the center of the city, studying physics and metaphysics with city elders.

Evidence of Jewish readerships for French literature in the Middle Ages, particularly romances, has been accumulating. This article focuses on a recently discovered tale from Italy, copied in Hebrew in MS JTS Rab. 1164, as a prism through which to explore the cultural interactions between Jewish and Christian society in Italy of the early Renaissance. I first analyze the Jewish tale, which I posit has an affinity with the Arthurian romance Yvain, The Knight of the Lion by Chrétien de Troyes, and expound on the thematic and poetic links between the two stories. I then examine Yvain’s reception in Italy as part of a broader phenomenon involving the acceptance, copying, adaptation, and assimilation of French romances in Italy into vernacular Italian. Finally, I present the story and the factors that played a role in its reception in the context of Italian Jewish society. The entirety of the review offers an overall portrait of the story's reception as a unique socioliterary phenomenon shared by Jews and non-Jews alike in Italy in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

One of the markers of the emerging Reform movement in the first quarter of the nineteenth century was the publication of synagogue regulations that introduced new norms of decorum and, occasionally, slight changes in the prayer service. Scholarly discussions of the first synagogue regulations have been limited to the available published regulations, namely, the Westphalian (1810) and Amsterdam's Adat Jesurun regulations (1809). The recently discovered regulations composed by Joseph Perl for his synagogue in Tarnopol (1815) enable us for the first time to consider an east European perspective for understanding the different varieties of the new trend of synagogue innovations in the early nineteenth century. In addition to an analysis of Perl's regulations, the following article explains the circumstances in which Perl's synagogue project took shape, and highlights the historiographical significance of his synagogue regulations. I argue that Perl may be credited as the first to suggest a religious path that was both traditionalist and modern, a path that later characterized the synagogue innovations in several Habsburg cities. An English translation of the regulations is provided in an appendix.