The ʾAgur—a relatively obscure and occasionally derided Jewish legal compendium of the late fifteenth century—represents the first halakhic work truly of the printed age, in that it was not simply a printed manuscript, a book that utilized the production value of the printing press without changes to its substance or presentation, but rather an original text, written by its author during his lifetime, to be precisely suited for the opportunities presented by print. Jacob Landau, the author, was wholly aware of the cultural ramifications of print and adapted his work to these new circumstances and possibilities. He created a text that could be used by both scholars and nonscholars and would appeal to a variety of geographically specific traditions. It was also the first Hebrew book to contain haskamot, which later were commonly used and even required in some Jewish communities. As the first halakhic book printed during its author's lifetime, justification was necessary for its very existence.

This article examines various attempts in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that sought to repackage and reorganize kabbalistic knowledge through the compilation of lexicons to one of the most sacred texts in the Jewish mystical canon, the Zohar. By considering the Zoharic lexicon ʾImrei binah, written by Yissakhar Baer ben Petaḥyah Moshe, printed in Prague in 1610, in diachronic and synchronic contexts, the article exposes competing strategies adopted by Jewish mystics to transmit the linguistic and theosophical layers of the Zohar. I will place and discuss lexicons to the Zohar within broader questions of cultural transmission and textuality, revealing the modalities through which these works generated meaning for Jewish and non-Jewish readers. As Kabbalah came to occupy an important role in the intellectual exchange between Jews and Christians in this period, Zoharic lexicons and other study guides played a major role as cultural mediators.

This article examines early modern learning through Ashkenazic responsa. Beyond explicit evidence from published responsa collections, implicit insights dwell in what these publications lack. These missing features shed light on sixteenth-century scholarly practices. The works’ organizational inconsistencies must be understood in context of learned archives. Such an adjustment offers a corrective to the regnant narrative, which views the introduction of print as a sharp rupture from earlier modes of transmission. This article suggests instead that the culture of printed books coexisted with older approaches, and that print was complemented by more disorderly and unconstrained forms of transmission. Comparing rabbinic “paper-ware” with contemporaneous humanist practices highlights the rabbi's working papers, focusing on a culture's dynamic activity rather than its stable output. This shift in perspective allows us to see rabbinic writings not merely as a collection of books but as a mode of scholarship.

This study is a comparative reading of two distinct narrative traditions with remarkably similar features of plot and content. The first tradition is from the Palestinian midrash Kohelet Rabbah, datable to the fifth to sixth centuries. The second is from John Moschos's Spiritual Meadow (Pratum spirituale), which is very close to Kohelet Rabbah in time and place. Although quite similar, the two narratives differ in certain respects. Pioneers of modern Judaic studies such as Samuel Krauss and Louis Ginzberg had been interested in the question of the relationships between early Christian authors and the rabbis; however, the relationships between John Moschos and Palestinian rabbinic writings have never been systematically treated (aside from one enlightening study by Hillel Newman). Here, in this case study, I ask comparative questions: Did Kohelet Rabbah borrow the tradition from Christian lore; or was the church author impressed by the teachings of Kohelet Rabbah? Alternatively, perhaps, might both have learned the shared story from a common continuum of local narrative tradition? Beyond these questions about literary dependence, I seek to understand the shared narrative in its cultural context.

ʾOrekh yamim (Length of days; Constantinople, 1560), a short book of guidelines on educating children and maintaining a religious and moral family life, was written by Rabbi Samuel Benveniste, who belonged to one of the communities of exiles from Spain in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This article analyzes the information that emerges from the guidebook on the state of education and family life in Jewish society of the time. Parents' great fear of child mortality and its effect on their educational conduct is prominent throughout the book, lending it its title. Although child mortality was equally prevalent in all parts of society, the article highlights the posttraumatic experience of Spanish exiles who lost many children in their travails, and suggests seeing the immense anxiety expressed in the essay against this background. In addition, Benveniste's admonitions concerning women's immorality, while characteristic of writings of his time, provide an interesting view of the social norms of his era: he depicts women's swearing by the lives of their children, their cursing, their wish to adorn themselves with jewelry, as well as the difficulties of their daily lives.

In the early 1920s, the Viennese writer and journalist Eugen Hoeflich promoted a unique vision of Zionism that aligned Jewish nationalism with a set of anticolonial ideologies collectively known as Pan-Asianism. This article explores the poetic and political strategies Hoeflich employed in order to affiliate Zionism with the Pan-Asian idea in general, and the Indian anticolonial struggle in particular. I read Hoeflich's turn to Pan-Asianism as an attempt to work through a conceptual problem that theorist Partha Chatterjee calls the “postcolonial predicament.” That is, how might the Jews assert their collective identity without reproducing the Eurocentric discourses that presuppose their inferiority? Hoeflich's vision of Indian-Jewish solidarity constitutes an imaginative effort to de-Europeanize Jewish nationalism and disentangle Zionism from British imperial designs. On a broader level, this study sheds light on the transnational solidarities that informed central European Zionists in the interwar era, and points to the discursive continuities that linked Jewish nationalists in Europe to anticolonial thinkers in Asia.

On the basis of a letter preserved in the Cairo Geniza, Judah Halevi is assumed to have originally composed his influential book of religious thought, the Kuzari, as a polemical response to a Karaite convert. However, he neither perceived nor described the Karaites as heretics. In fact, his depiction of the adherents of this alternative to Rabbanite Judaism and their origins so appealed to the Karaites that some of them believed that the author had been a (crypto-)Karaite himself, and his reconstructions of the movement's history became appropriated as the founding myth of Karaism. This paper attempts to discern Halevi's attitude toward the Karaites, and his perception of their main fault. It also addresses the fundamental question of his purpose in writing the Kuzari.