The question whether prophecy is a natural phenomenon or a divine gift goes back to classical antiquity. A natural explanation of divination in sleep was first attempted by Democritus whose theory operates with the notion of ‘images’ (eidōla) that affect the soul in dreams and foretell the future. Whence these images emanate does not seem to be too clear from the sources at our disposal. Democritus is said to have described them as “great and gigantic … although not indestructible,” and from this we may, perhaps, infer that he associated the images with the statues of gods to which the ancients ascribed an odd assortment of capacities. The ‘images’ may therefore signify certain emanations from those statues, especially since Aristotle distinctly speaks of Democritus′ theory as one involving ‘images and emanations’ that derive from certain objects. The theory thus understood bears some resemblance to what Maimonides reports as the manner in which the Sabians explain prophecy: statues in temples and holy trees give prophetic revelation to people. Whatever the correct interpretation of Democritus' theory of dream visions, its intent was clearly scientific. This first effort to see divination in naturalistic terms—Cicero criticized it as far too crude—was to be superseded by Aristotle's more sophisticated theory in his small treatise On Divination in Sleep which forms part of the so-called Parva naturalia.

Its French and English antecedents notwithstanding, Canada is an American country. From 1759 to 1776 Canada was merely the fourteenth American colony of Great Britain. Had the fortunes of war been different, Canada might well have become part of the United States, or part or all of the United States might have remained British, joined with the northernmost colony. The Treaty of Paris made formal in 1783 the division between Canada and the other thirteen colonies, now independent. The treaty did not, however, put an end to the intimate cultural, economic and personal relationships, which had already developed among all North Americans of British origin. In fact, as time went on, those ties became closer, despite the border and despite the sometimes divergent political interests of the two countries. For Jews, that Canada was an American country was of considerable importance. By European standards, England was remarkably tolerant and open. With its vast economic potential, empty spaces, and society-in-the-making, however, America represented the real land of opportunity—economic and social—for all eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europeans, and especially for Jews.

In a previous article, I studied the short and anonymous Hebrew First Crusade chronicle. The choice of text S as the starting point for an investigation of the three surviving records of Jewish suffering and heroism in 1096 was a natural one. The text, as it now stands, constitutes a wellorganized and coherent unit, broken off suddenly during the depiction of the destruction of Mayence Jewry. While it is certain that the chronicler did not witness personally all the events which he described, he did integrate his written and oral sources into an account which exhibits a broad and consistent grasp of the unfolding of the First Crusade and the related violence which inundated Rhineland Jewry.

L, the longest of the Hebrew First Crusade chronicles, is more difficult to analyze, partly because of the length of the text, partly because of its poor state of preservation, and partly because the awkwardness of the chronicler has left tantalizing hints regarding the process of editing. Like S, L is based on a series of written and oral sources. The editor of L, however, was less adroit than the editor of S in fusing his sources into a satisfying unit. Because of this lack of grace, the hand of the editor is more apparent in L, although the precise dimensions of his role cannot be fully clarified on the basis of the texts currently available. While the problems associated with L are vexing, its richness of detail and its power necessitate an effort to clarify some of these problems and to suggest tentative solutions. Many of our conclusions will be speculative; the state of the text and its sister texts will allow no more.

In De anima 3. 5 Aristotle distinguished two aspects in the activity of intellection or knowing: one active, the other passive. His remarks are notoriously obscure, and they have occasioned an enormous exegetical literature from antiquity to our own day. Besides laying the foundations of an epistemological edifice that remained intact for many centuries, Aristotle also suggested that the active factor in knowing is eternal and immortal. Thus, he retained in some form Plato's belief that there is a link between knowledge and immortality. Several of the leading ancient and medieval interpreters of Aristotle developed this suggestion into a complex doctrine of immortality, the main thesis of which was the idea that human perfection consists in union or conjunction with the active power in knowledge. This essay intends to examine Levi ben Gerson's (Gersonides) critique of the theory of immortality as conjunction. We begin with the psychological presuppositions of the theory.

In the growing literature on the socioeconomic characteristics of the constituent immigrant groups of America's cities during the mid-nineteenth century, German Jews have been sadly neglected. The reasons are primarily practical ones. Because “Jewish” or “Hebrew” was neither a census nor immigration category during this period, German Jews are difficult to identify in public records. Furthermore, they generally comprised only a small minority of the total immigrant population in American urban centers prior to the 1880s. Even those specifically interested in American Jewish history have seldom gone beyond cursory analyses of the socioeconomic characteristics of the German Jews, reflecting both the traditional emphasis in Jewish communal histories on institutions and their leaders, and the focusing of attention in such social histories as do exist on the larger and seemingly more significant Eastern European Jewish immigration beginning in the 1880s.

Not how halakhic texts tell stories about other things, but how they tell stories about themselves is our concern here. Confronting us is not the problem of extracting evidence regarding trade or communal organization from law, but the question of how one cracks the colorless and highly impersonal mold into which the thought of the medieval period was cast to reveal a world of individuality, development, and ambivalence. Can the fragmentary and recalcitrant halakhic texts be made to talk history?

The use of tales and fragments of tales concerning the Baal Shem Tov is not infrequent in the works of Shmuel Yosef Agnon; in fact, an entire collection of such stories is included in his volume, Ha-’esh ve-ha-‘eṣim. The story which will concern us in this study, however, is “‘Al’even ’aḥat” (“On One Rock”) which first appeared in 1934. The story is of interest because it relates to a legend from Shivfiei ha-Besht (The Praises of the Besht), the very first collection of tales about the Baal Shem Tov to be published, even though the figure of the Besht himself does not appear in the story by Agnon.