In the year 1620, Abraham b. Naphtali Hirsch Schor, the head of the rabbinical court of Satanov, Poland, wrote to Rabbi Mordecai b. David Katz of the neighboring community of Lvov (Lemberg) about a “great and terrible act of God which I heard and saw with my own eyes here in the holy congregation of Satanov.” R. Abraham related the following story:

…Here in the holy congregation of Gródek (Gorodok) three parasangs away from Satanov, there lives a man named R. Gedaliah with a small four-and-ahalf- year-old son. The youth is a mere boy having no superiority in his studies over the rest of the children of his age. But when his father began to study the Hebrew alphabet and the prayer book with him and saw that the holy spirit rests upon him, he subsequently brought the boy before me to the holy congregation of Satanov to test him. And I tested him several times—a hundred times and more—myself along with my colleagues who were with me and we saw the work of the Lord and his wonders, for He is exceedingly great. I asked him: “Please tell me the beginning of the halakhah learned today.” He immediately related the halakhah, answering: “Rabbi Ashi said that our mishnah states: I can likewise prove,” etc.

The past few years have witnessed an expansion of the range of sources that Talmudists regularly employ in their research on the Bavli. Scholars now turn to Iranian epic and folk literature; to Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Eastern Christian ritual and theological writings; to Sasanian civil law; and to other nonrabbinic sources in an effort to broaden and deepen their understanding of the Bavli and its place in the “splendid confusion” that was Sasanian Mesopotamian society. As Yaakov Elman has pointed out, this research trend serves as a corrective for more than half a century of scholarly neglect, which was only encouraged by a dearth of critical editions of Middle Persian literature and more general studies of Sasanian culture and religions. Now, following a steady output of some long-anticipated editions, and, more significantly, as a result of recent collaboration between Talmudists and Iranists, the coming years hold great promise for a radically new understanding of the Bavli and its world.

On the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, October 28, 1926, the Neolog Jewish Community of Bratislava (Pozsony, Pressburg) gathered for a commemorative service led by their chief rabbi, Dr. Samuel Funk. They were joined by representatives of the government administration and other religious confessions. Toward the end of his sermon, an increasingly agitated Rabbi Funk turned and pointed with an angry finger at the members of the assimilationist Union of Slovak Jews (Sväz slovenských židov) in attendance from his position behind the podium. He publicly accused them of destroying Jewish unity and making it impossible for the Jewish Party to win a parliamentary mandate. He concluded his sermon by recalling a meeting that he had recently enjoyed with the president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. President Masaryk, Funk related, regarded it as very embarrasing that in spite of the 100,000 votes that the Jewish Party had received in 1925, it was not able to obtain even one parliamentary mandate. Funk reported that Masaryk only respected those Jews who declared Jewish as their nationality.

Gershon Hundert, one of the leading scholars of Eastern European Jewry, has portrayed Hasidism as “one of many movements of religious enthusiasm that arose in the eighteenth century.” Though most scholars today agree with this description, they diverge regarding the goals of the movement, the causes of its emergence and spread, and its impact on Eastern European Jewry. Simon Dubnow, the father-founder of modern Eastern European Jewish historiography, considered Hasidism to be a response to the seventeenth-century communal crisis. He portrayed Hasidism as a spiritual movement of ordinary Jews who rebelled against the stringencies of rabbinic Judaism and sought spiritual accommodation from charismatic yet uneducated leaders. Benzion Dinur saw Hasidism as a popular revolution against the corrupt power of the kahal, the umbrella self-governing organization of Polish Jewry. Gershom Scholem maintained that it was the popularization of Kabbalah that was responsible for the phenomenal success of Hasidism, its rapid spread, and the mass following of the zaddikim, the hasidic masters. By the end of the late twentieth century, most scholars agreed that Hasidism was a popular movement triggered by the economic breakdown of Polish Jewry, directed against the legal authorities, and led by mystically oriented leaders with no significant rabbinic pedigree or deep knowledge of traditional Jewish sources.

The Bavli's story of Herod's rise to power, murder of the Hasmonean family and of the rabbis, encounter with Bava b. Buta, and construction of the temple, found at Bava Batra 3b-4a, has long puzzled scholars. Many aspects of this story diverge from Josephus's account, our main source for historical knowledge of Herod's life and deeds. This paper argues that the storyteller has been influenced by Persian sources from the Sasanian period. Important elements of the Bavli story were modeled on the account of the rise of Ardashir, founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as recounted in a Sasanian text known as the Karnamag i Ardashir i Pabagan, “The Book of the Deeds of Ardashir son of Pabag.” The rabbis understood the transition from the Hasmonean to Herodian dynasties through the prism of the transition from the Parthian to Sasanian dynasties. They identified Herod with Ardashir, and constructed a story of Herod's usurpation and rise to power on the basis of Ardashir's usurpation and rise to power as recounted in Sasanian sources.

Despite a distinguished life and a remarkable written and intellectual legacy, history has not been kind to Nathan Birnbaum. While alive, he was acknowledged not only as one of the founders of central European Zionism but also as a major figure in Jewish politics and thought. As a journalist and essayist, he contributed to and was read widely in a staggering number of Jewish periodicals in central Europe—several of which, such as the first Jewish nationalist periodical in the German language, Selbst-Emancipation—he founded and edited himself. Yet today, little of his legacy is known, and his massive literary and intellectual production has received surprisingly little attention from Jewish historians.

In recent decades, talmudic studies, along with other disciplines devoted to the study of texts, have experienced numerous paradigm shifts regarding both methods and goals. The naive presupposition that a text provides reliable information about historically situated characters, whether those described in the text or those who authored the text, has been vigorously challenged on many counts and from many angles. Responses to the challenge have ranged from sophisticated attempts to recover hermeneutical stability, whether rooted in authorial intention, in textually grounded meaning, or in some form of dialogue between the reader and the author or text, to the panoply of deconstructive approaches and other forms of postmodern recontextualization.

This article examines the dynamics between the halakhic and aggadic components of a sugya in the Babylonian Talmud, in which the halakhic discussion of the Yom Kippur afflictions listed in M. Yoma 8:1 is followed by a seemingly unrelated aggadic passage that focuses primarily on the manna in the wilderness. A close reading of the aggadic passage reveals that it in fact contains substantive links to the preceding halakhic discussion. Moreover, when the aggadic passage is read in the context of the preceding halakhic discussion, it provides an alternative understanding of the Yom Kippur afflictions that challenges the understanding that arises from the halakhic discussion. Nevertheless, a close look at the redaction of the sugya shows that the alternative understanding that arises from the aggadic part remains on either the conceptual plane or the supererogatory one, and does not cross over to the normative plane.

In his study Reading for the Plot, Peter Brooks defines plot as that which “makes us read forward, seeking in the unfolding of narrative a line of intention and a portent of design that hold the promise of progress toward meaning.” Plot proves to be a rich and multifaceted concept to explore in reading Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004), in which counterfactual histories, personal plotlines, a cluster of subplots, and the reader’s awareness of metanarrative (“masterplot”) all contribute to the complex shaping of the text.

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.

Scholars of rabbinic literature have often noted the widespread tendency to question and argue with God in rabbinic literature. Oddly, they have largely ignored the unequivocal antiprotest traditions found in these writings. Responding to this scholarly lacuna, this essay collects anti-protest traditions of the midrash and Talmud, and explicates their exegetical and conceptual basis. In the process, the paper makes two central arguments: First, that later anti-protest texts intensify or radicalize their opposition; while early anti-protest traditions merely prohibit one from challenging God, later aggadot tend to attach harsh punishments to that prohibition. Second, from a comparative perspective, rabbinic anti-protest sentiments diverge from similar sentiments voiced by the church fathers. While both critique the act of protest on exegetical and (similar) conceptual grounds, they have different ways of harmonizing their conservative attitudes with a biblical tradition that problematically, at least for them, seems to tolerate, if not valorize, confronting God. More specifically, whereas the rabbinic position tends to retell the biblical confrontation by having God castigate or punish the protester, early Christian thinkers, by stark contrast, tend to reject the literal reading of Scripture altogether: any apparent protest by a biblical hero is deemed a dangerous misreading.

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.

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.

A central concern in the study of gender in Judaism is the status of women and the relationship between partners in a marriage. In this article I explore a concealed dialogue, or perhaps more accurately, a dialogue that has been condemned to silence, on that subject.

With the sure touch of the true historian (a rare gift) Gershom Scholem has opened up for us new avenues toward the understanding of Jewish messianism and, in particular, its most fateful manifestation after the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt: Sabbatianism. There are no pseudomessiahs, he teaches us. For any attempt to translate the idea of messianism into reality is doomed to end in failure, but failure is not its end. This is demonstrated by the movement connected with Sabbatai Sevi, or, if one may associate two such incongruous phenomena, the death of Christ on the cross.

This article discusses the ways scholars have outlined the process of Jewish adaptation (or lack of it) from their Christian surroundings in northern Europe during the High Middle Ages. Using the example of penitential fasting, the first two sections of the article describe medieval Jewish practices and some of the approaches that have been used to explain the similarity between medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian customs. The last two sections of the article suggest that in addition to looking for texts that connect between Jewish and Christian thought and beliefs behind these customs, it is useful to examine what medieval Jews and Christians saw of each other's customs living in close urban quarters. Finally, the article suggests that when shaping medieval Jewish and Christian identity, the differences emphasized in shared everyday actions and visible practice were no less important than theological distinctions. As part of the discussion throughout the article, the terminology used by scholars to describe the process of Jewish appropriation from the local surroundings is described, focusing on terms such as “influence” and “inward acculturation,” as well as “appropriation.”

The literary and historical study of rabbinic literature increases our understanding of rabbinic texts and enables us to isolate different stages in the history of traditions. Amoraic teachings, in particular, have undergone a complex process of enunciation, interpretation, transmission, adaption, and application prior to their incorporation into their present contexts. They have likewise received literary enrichment and suffered recasting in the course of their integration into wider units and of the overall compilation of gemara. Accordingly, the extant versions may not reflect the most fundamental or original use and import of a tradition. Once aware of these processes we can, moreover, better appreciate the concerns which elicited and shaped the early stages of the teachings as well as the later ones which may have contributed to the transformations.

In October 1912, the twenty-four-year-old Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon embarked on a ship in the port of Jaffa, then Palestine, the destination of his trip being Germany, or, to be more exact, the city of Berlin. Agnon left for Germany in the company of Dr. Arthur Ruppin, known as the “father of Zionist settlement in Eres Yisra'el.” The friendship between Agnon and Ruppin had developed in Jaffa, where Agnon had tutored both Ruppin and his wife in Hebrew. And it was probably with the support of Dr. Ruppin, himself a native of Germany and a graduate of a German university, that Agnon decided to leave Palestine, where he had resided for more than three years, to see the world, which in those days meant Berlin.