“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” The Red Jews are best known from classic Yiddish writing, most notably from Mendele's Kitser masoes Binyomin hashlishi (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third). This novel, first published in 1878, represents the initial appearance of the Red Jews in modern Yiddish literature. This comical travelogue describes the adventures of Benjamin, who sets off in search of the legendary Red Jews. But who are these Red Jews or, in Yiddish, di royte yidelekh? The term denotes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the ten tribes that in biblical times had composed the Northern Kingdom of Israel until they were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Over time, the myth of their return emerged, and they were said to live in an uncharted location beyond the mysterious Sambatyon River, where they would remain until the Messiah's arrival at the end of time, when they would rejoin the rest of the Jewish people.

“Black” themes held a substantial place in twentieth-century American Yiddish poetry and prose, as well as in Yiddish journalism. As Hasia Diner notes in her work on Jews and blacks in the United States in the twentieth century, Jews sympathized with the plight of American blacks and their fight for civil rights. However, this had not always been the case, as evidenced by the many staunch Jewish supporters of slavery and Jewish slave owners and traders. Jonathan Schorsch claims that “under the sign of the Haskala…little changed” in this respect. In discussing a reference by Isaac Satanov to black slavery, Schorsch notes:

Contemporary scholarship no longer seeks to identify what was once termed “the historical kernel” of stories in the Bavli. According to scholarly consensus these longer narratives in the Bavli were formulated more or less while the Bavli as a whole was being redacted and, as Jeffrey Rubenstein has argued, reflect later Babylonian rabbinic culture. Regarding the building blocks of these stories, literary analysis at times indicates that what the historian once believed to be primitive exaggeration is in fact the earliest element of the story. With this in mind, Shamma Friedman coined the term “literary kernel” to replace the former “historical kernel.” The advantage of the term “literary kernel” is that it can be defined in a fairly objective way as the common storyline that can be identified by comparing the Bavli narrative with the story as it appears in aggadic sources in the Yerushalmi or other Palestinian traditions.

When Chief Rabbi Ḥayim (Vittorio) Castiglioni of Rome (b. 1840) passed away in 1911, he was cremated as per his request and his ashes were then buried in the Jewish cemetery of his native Trieste. One local Jewish newspaper pointed out that Castiglioni's position—cremation is permitted according to Jewish law and is even preferable to traditional burial—was definitely a minority one within the Italian rabbinate. By no means, however, was he accused by any of his rabbinic colleagues of being a heretic.

This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan, using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography. Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?

The literary works of many Israeli novelists and poets—among them Ḥaim Hazaz, Nathan Bistriski, Uri Ẓvi Greenberg, Amir Gilboa, Theodor Herzl, Abraham Samuel Stein, Zalman Shazar, Benyamin Shvili, and Yehoram Ben Meir—reference and develop the themes of Sabbatai Ẓvi and the Sabbatean movement; and scholars have explored the use of messianism in general and Sabbateanism in particular in Israeli literature. Yet no one has comprehensively examined the role that the Sabbatean movement plays in the oeuvre of S. Y. Agnon, the most important Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, despite numerous references to it in his work.

On Sunday, the twelfth of Adar, March 2, 1681, the parnasim, the lay leaders of Altona, recorded an enactment in their communal logbook, the pinkas kehillah, regulating women's use of the local mikva'ot. Designating two privately-owned ritual baths as the only approved immersion locations for most of the women in the community, they decreed that defiance of this decree was to be punished with some of the most severe weapons in the arsenal of the communal leaders. Four years later, the parnasim reversed their policy and, with the permission of the community's rabbinic leadership, required the women to use only the newly built kahalishe, or community, mikveh, banning the use of the two previously approved mikva'ot. This article examines the construction and reconstruction of these policies regulating women's use of mikva'ot, offering insight into how designated communal institutions were developed in the early modern period as well as how these institutions were used both to finance the community and to forge communal identity. Moreover, consideration of the mikveh as a locus for building communal institutions and, in particular, communal identity, offers insight into how the growing bureaucratization of Jewish communal life in the early modern period affected women's lives.

Several scholars have noted the affinity of the German Orthodox thinker Isaac Breuer (1883–1946) for the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In fact, legend has it that Breuer had two large pictures hanging over the desk in his study: one of his grandfather Samson Raphael Hirsch and, next to it, a picture of the philosopher from Königsberg, as if in perfect harmony. Just as Maimonides, eight hundred years earlier, had tried to reconcile the biblical Moses with Aristotle in the Guide of the Perplexed, Breuer attempted to explain Hirsch's theology using Kantian terminology. But if Maimonides interpreted the Torah of Moses to fit the needs of Aristotelian metaphysics, Breuer did the opposite: he had Kant's epistemology yield to the needs of his own interpretation of the Torah.

When in 1714 the artist Israel ben Mordecai Liśnicki from Jaryczów painted the interior of the wooden synagogue of Chodorów, today in the L'viv (Polish, Lwów) region of western Ukraine, he did not know that one of his paintings would be the subject of divergent interpretations by art historians some three hundred years later. The controversy centers around the depiction of an eagle grasping in its talons two hares trying to escape outward. The hares are grasped by the neck (fig. 1). This depiction, located in the center of the ceiling, is surrounded by a decorative medallion inscribed with the verse “Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings, gliding down to his young, so did He spread His wings and take him, bear him along on His talons” (Deuteronomy 32:11). In the background are the twelve signs of the zodiac.

The turn of the nineteenth century saw the publication of an abundance of travel narratives and texts in natural history written by maskilic Jews in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German in Hebrew characters. Several of these were maskilic translations of German children's books such as Georg Christian Raff's Naturgeschichte für Kinder or Joachim Heinrich Campe's travel stories for children. Others were fragmentary translations of German science books such as Anton Friedrich Büsching's Neue Erdbeschreibung. These translations were inspired by the maskilim's desire to acculturate their fellow Jews according to the standards of the European “high culture” of their time. The scientific, geographical, and philosophical knowledge offered by the source texts, combined with the rhetoric of voyage and discovery, as well as the stories of domesticating and acculturating “savage” peoples and wild animals, provided the maskilim with a compelling platform for disseminating maskilic knowledge, ideology, and goals.

In 1953 the government of the newly founded state of Israel sent an elite army unit to attack the village of Kibiyeh, just across the Jordanian border. The attack was in reprisal for violence against Jewish villages on the Israeli side of the border. Since the end of the 1948 war, armed groups from Jordanian border towns had been infiltrating Israel and terrorizing its citizens, and in one such raid on the village of Yehud, a woman and her two young children were killed. The Israeli attack on Kibiyeh was in response to that incident. Kibiyeh was chosen as the target because the perpetrators of the violence in Yehud had apparently come from there. In the Kibiyeh raid, several dozen Arabs were killed, including women and children. Condemnation of the raid from the international community was swift. Opinion in Israel was mostly supportive of the operation, though a vocal minority opposed it.

Memory and its representations can reveal as much about a culture's sense of itself as they do about its past. Israeli critics have traced the ways in which representations of the Holocaust in their country's films reflect, among many other issues, Israeli culture's preoccupation with the construction of Israeli identity. According to one critic, the Holocaust survivor in films of the 1940s and 1950s embodied weakness and passivity: “all the traits that Israeli identity [was] meant to contrast.” In the 1970s, another critic suggests, films “read” the Holocaust from a “nationalist perspective…highlighting heroic resistance….” Thus, within a few decades, Israeli cinema seems to have represented in radically different ways—through the lens of the Holocaust—the intricacies of Israeli identity formation: first, by shaping memory in terms of the putative weaknesses of diaspora Jews, contrasting them with the strengths of the “new” Israeli Jew; and later, by emphasizing characteristics that linked heroic resisters with heroic Israelis.