In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Behind this exercise in local history, however, lies a broader intention: to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply “a gloom-filled parenthesis” for Morvedre's Jews but instead “an era of remarkable resurgence” (3)—nay, “a Jewish Renaissance,” as the book's title provocatively proclaims—Meyerson challenges the regnant vision of Spain's Jewish communities as sliding almost inexorably toward expulsion after 1391. In making his case, he weds an awareness of the historical aerial view with a fluency in older and more recent historiographic trends and an extraordinary mastery of events on the ground. The result is a copiously documented, lucidly written exploration of a treasure trove of hitherto mostly unknown archival sources that dazzles with its wealth of detail and enlivens through regular recourse to vivid vignettes.

Not otherwise known as a bright era for the Jews of Christian Europe, the late fourteenth century nonetheless counted a number of thriving Jewish medical careers. One physician who surfaced in this period was Jacob b. Solomon of Avignon (sometimes called Jacob b. Solomon haTzarfati), whose career has been documented in two cities. In northern France, the land of his ancestors, we find him in the 1370s in the orbit of the University of Paris and its prestigious medical faculty. By the early 1380s, however, Jacob was at the papal court in Avignon, where or near where he was raised. There, in his own day at least, he achieved some renown while serving as physician to Pope Clement VII's brother, Count Pierre of Geneva.

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii, 329 pp. @T2first: During the past three decades, several major scholarly studies and personal accounts of Egyptian Jewry have been published in Europe, Israel, and the United States.The most noted scholarly publications include Jacob M. Landau, Jews in Nineteenth Century Egypt (New York: New York University Press, 1969); Gudrun Kramer, The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914–1952 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989); Michael M. Laskier, The Jews of Egypt, 1920–1970: In the Midst of Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Yoram Meital, 'Atarim yehudiyim be-Miṣrayim (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1995); Zvi Zohar, Tradition and Change: Halachic Response of Middle Eastern Rabbis to Legal and Technological Changes [Egypt and Syria, 1880–1920]. [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute, 1993); and Yosef Algamil, Pirqei Tuvia ben Simḥa Levi Babovitch: 'Aḥaron ḥakhmei ha-kara'im be-Miṣrayim, 2 vols. (Ramlah: Center for Karaite Jewry, 1998). Some of the best personal accounts are Maurice Mizrahi, L'Egypte et ses Juifs: Le Temps revolu, xixe–xxe siècles (Geneva: Imprimerie Avenir, 1977); Yitzhaq Gormezano-Goren, Blanche [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1987); Jacqueline Kahanoff Mi-mizrah. shemesh (Tel-Aviv: Yariv Hadar, 1978); Ronit Matalon, Zeh ‘im ha-panim 'eleynu (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); Rachel Maccabi, Mitzrayim sheli (Tel-Aviv: Sifriyat ha-Poalim, 1968); and André Aciman, Out of Egypt (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1994). Joel Beinin's book is the product of several years of research in Israel, Egypt, France, and the United States, in which he consulted not only books but also newspaper articles in English, French, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as archives, among them the YIVO Institute records; the Haganah, Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa‘ir, and the Central Zionist archives (Israel); the Jamie Lehmann Memorial Collection of Yeshiva University (containing the records of the Cairo community); and the U.S. National Archives. He also interviewed Egyptian Jews and non-Jews.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the representational realist painter Israel Hershberg in his Jerusalem studio, where he was busy working on a small painting, one of a series of “tree portraits.” It was an exquisite work, in which each dappling of light on every needle of a towering cypress was exactingly represented on a miniature scale. But I was startled to see that, while he had blocked out the shape of the tree and the general parameters of light and shade “in the wild,” this champion of rendering from life was actually completing most of the painting in the studio. At first I thought the tree must be outside the window, or that he must be working from a photograph, but when I asked him where the detailing was coming from, he tapped his finger to his forehead.

Literary approaches to rabbinic literature entered the field through biblical studies, in which scholars from different quarters and different points of reference were using them to make sense of the biblical text as it has come down to us. The literary approach took umbrage at the way in which the historical source-critical approach dissects the Bible into its constituent sources. The literary approach was an overt attempt to overcome the fractures that historical criticism had introduced into the surface of the biblical text. It proposed instead to read the text—with all of its surface irregularities, gaps, and hiatuses—as coherent and meaningful.

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.

Among the many themes to which Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man speaks so richly and suggestively, I will focus here on three that seem especially pertinent to our understandings of American Jewish identity, as well as to the academic practice of Jewish studies, and that exhibit the film's blend of complexity, clarity, and opacity. All three are closely related aspects of a larger question about the possibility of communication and, hence, of relation, but it should be useful to articulate them separately here. Each may be said to present, through the characters' interactions and the things they read and hear, its own question for judgment, but in no case does A Serious Man indicate how the viewer is to rule on that question.

[Reb Zevi] saw and realized that the business was leading [Reb Issachar] astray, that he was being distracted by it and was distracting others, until finally he felt like one tugged by a distorted idea, a senseless bit of sophistry or vain embellishment, like one who becomes increasingly bogged down as he trudges from one pilpul to the next, from one piece of vanity to the next, until it finally drags him into a morass from which he can never emerge.

The various versions of the story about the daughter of Nakdimon ben Gurion may be used to explain two phenomena: (a) the story as a hermeneutic device, by which the very act of presenting the verse as part of the story imparts to it a new meaning, which differs not only from the peshaf (plain meaning), but also from the other exegeses of the sages concerning this same verse and (b) the modification that results in this new meaning because of the diversities in the different versions of the story.

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.

Despite the focus by the popular media on the revival of Jewish instrumental klezmer music during the past decades, surprisingly little of a scholarly nature has been written until recently about either the klezmer tradition or its revival. Since 1999 a relatively large number of new book publications of both a scholarly and a popular nature have appeared. Besides the four volumes under review here, they include books by Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin, Moshe Beregovski, Seth Rogovoy, Mark Slobin, Zinovij Stoljar, and Yale Strom. It is hoped that the publication of these four works (and the other recent works not reviewed here) will open a broader discussion of the complex of issues surrounding klezmer and ḥasidic music and stimulate further research in these areas.

In his introduction to A Study of History, Toynbee observed that “in modern Western historical research, as in modern Western industry, the quantity and location of raw materials threaten to govern the lives of human beings.” In an inability to manufacture his own sources and yet with a reluctance to overlook any means for brightening an obscure picture of the past, the historian may at times allow insufficient evidence to support interpretations that gain acceptance merely for lack of anything better. Such an occupational hazard inevitably plagues all branches of historiography, but it is more prevalent in the efforts to unravel the mysteries of “darker” epochs, like those of Western Europe in the early Middle Ages. Not only does scanty source material limit the historian's treatment of this period, but the peculiar interests, motivations, and backgrounds of medieval writers restrict the legitimate use of the few documents which do exist. The medievalist's eye must be at once discerning and critical, careful not to overlook any evidence but wary so as not to misuse it, even if no other sources point to contradictory conclusions.

Yigael Yadin's publication of the Temple Scroll (ts) from Qumran is a pioneering work of scholarship that will stimulate a generation of further research. At this relatively early date, most attention naturally will focus on understanding the scroll itself and its place within Qumran literature. Alongside these concerns, however, are many tantalizing prospects for comparative study, through which the literature and life of Qumran might illumine the larger context of Judaism in late antiquity. Clearly, for example, the way TS treats biblical law is of both intrinsic and comparative significance. This study is a preliminary contribution to a fertile area for future investigations.

In the mid-1930s, when the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow began to publish his autobiography, he gave it the formidable title The Book of Life: Reminiscences and Reflections, Material for the History of My Time. Drawing not only on his memory, but on copious diaries and a prodigious literary output going back to the 1880s, Dubnow traced his journey from shtetl Judaism to Jewish nationalism—a journey typical (onemight almost say prototypical) of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewish intellectual's search for a new definition of himself as Jew and modern man. The substance of Dubnow's Book of Life frees the title from pretentiousness; more than a mere compilation, much of the autobiography (especially the first volume and a half) was an act of synthesis and integratsiia dushi (“self-integration”), two of Dubnow's favorite terms. My aim in this paper is to reflect anew on the process of Dubnow's self-integration, bridging the gap between a purely biographical approach and a purely ideological one in order to show how a distinctive nationalist stance crystallized out of Dubnow's personal growth. Nationalism was a hard-won, by no means self-evident solution to an overlapping sequence of emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Dubnow provides us with a picture of the groping that this self-transformation entailed, a picture that can be supplemented, and to a certain extent revised, by listening for resonances between life and thought undetected by Dubnow himself.

When in 1981 the Israeli Cameri Theater performed The Passion of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin, the leading avant-garde playwrightin Israel (viewed by some as “the bad boy of the modern Israeli stage”),1 public outrage reached unprecedented heights.The scandal was partially provoked by Levin′s staging.His taste for the carnal and the cruel was much too unpalatable for many stomachs to digest.“People actually walked out, while others covered their eyes,” reported a review in the Jerusalem Post.2 No less detrimental, however, was the specific angle from which Levin th? playwright elected to retell the biblical story.For although the Hebrew title of the play, Yisurei Iyov, may be literally rendered as “Job′s Afflictions,” our translation was advisedly chosen: In his version, Levin catapults Job from the fictional land of Uz to Palestine of the Roman era, thereby embedding Job′s ordeal in that later agon between man and God–the passion of Christ.Accordingly, this dramatized Job does not live to hear an answer from the whirlwind, nor does he see his life redeemed.With a dramatic sleight of hand he is, paradoxically enough, the only character in the play who refuses to deny the existence of God–thus condemning himself to the stake.

In the introduction to his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides provides us with a rationale for the composition of this work as well as instructions for the targeted reader on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style. Such devices as contradiction, diffuse and seemingly discordant treatment of subject matter, and deliberate ruses are employed to accommodate both halakhic legal constraints on the overt teaching of physics and metaphysics and the wide intellectual disparity of his potential readers. The sensitive nature of the topics to be explored demands an unorthodox pedagogy that both illuminates and conceals, allowing entrance to the qualified few while excluding those who cannot cope with the intellectual rigors involved. Rabbinic stricture prohibits revealing anything more of the Account of the Chariot (metaphysics) than chapter headings, and therefore Maimonides cautions, “my purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed so as not to oppose that divine purpose which has concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths requisite for His apprehension.”