The justification of plans and programs is a necessary condition of the relationship between systems of education, both obligatory and voluntary, and the publics they serve. Those who are responsible for the conduct of the educational enterprise in general and the schooling of the young in particular must provide those who support the system, financially and otherwise, with acceptable and defensible reasons for the efforts and activities of the schools. The idea of justification in education rests on the assumption that the process of schooling, whatever its form and content, is subject to rational control and that the authority for the conduct of schools is derived from the principles inherent in the justification offered. A proferred justification is most effective and likely of acceptance when the positions it generates on educational issues fit the general fabric of ideals and aspirations of the society to which it is addressed. If, as we believe, justification is a necessary part of the rhetoric which surrounds legislatively determined and state maintained school systems—i.e., systems whose right to existence is not subject to question or doubt in any modern society and where attendance is required by law—then it follows that it is of even greater significance for voluntary school systems which lack the coercive power of their governmental counterparts—i.e., Jewish education.

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.

Trousseau lists in the hundreds, complete or fragmentary, have survived in the Cairo Geniza. Normally they are included in marriage contracts, rarely in engagement settlements, and many have been preserved separately, bearing only the names of the bride and the groom with or without date, and often lacking even these pieces of information. This happened when the extant sheet had originally formed part of a larger document, or when the trousseau was listed in a record book of the community.

In a work of moral philosophy which first appeared in the year 1168, Moses Maimonides finds that human speech, when considered from the standpoint of religion, is divisible into five categories: the prescribed; the cautioned-against or prohibited; the rejected; the desired; and the permitted. For each classification he provides appropriate examples, then he stops to observe a difficulty that may seemingly be posed for this entire scheme by one highly particular form of speech, which is poetry. Maimonides begins to resolve the difficulty as follows:

Know that poetical compositions, in whichever language they may be, should be examined with regard to their themes in order to determine whether they follow a manner of speech which we classified. Indeed, I explain this even though it is clear, inasmuch as I have seen elders and saintly men of our coreligionists when they are at a wine banquet, such as a wedding or some other occasion, and were a man to wish to recite an Arabic poem, even if the theme of that poem were the praise of courage or generosity, of the category of the desired, or the praises of wine, of the category of the permitted, they would protest it with every manner of protest, for in their opinion it is not permitted to listen to it. However, were the bard to recite any manner of Hebrew poem, they would not protest it, and it would not be evil in their sight despite there being in those words themes that pertain to the categories of the cautioned-against or the rejected.

Several years ago Gershom Scholem's authoritative work on the seventeenth century messianic figure Sabbatai Sevi, first published in Hebrew in 1957, appeared in a revised English translation. The importance of Scholem's work for an informed understanding of the Sabbatian movement and for the general study of religious and political movements must be acknowledged by all readers. The relevance of Sabbatai's career in the Levant to the specific historical context of post-Restoration England may be less evident. If the English involvement with Sabbatai is compared with the excitement generated in other European countries by his appearance, the English connection cannot fail to appear questionable. The Jewish community in London was a relatively small one at the time of Sabbatai's ascendancy, and the mass of contemporary material on which Scholem has drawn to document this extraordinary episode in Jewish history includes little that was produced for or by “English Jews.” Moreover, Scholem takes pains to discredit the common notion that English Christian speculations on the year 1666 played a direct, causal role in determining Sabbatai's public emergence in the summer of the preceding year, without denying the historical interest of this conjunction of Christian expectations and Jewish developments. In the following discussion, I hope to establish the major significance of Sabbatai Sevi for England by examining several questions—limited in comparison with those entertained by Sabbatai's most profound and exhaustive historian—concerning the English awareness of him 300 years ago. How and in what form did the unparalleled developments in the Levant from 1665 to 1667 first become known to English-speaking people? What contribution was made by the Sabbatian movement to Christian eschatology and to the expectations aroused among its devotees by the approach of the “wonderful year” 1666? What was the range of response to the movement among English observers; what was its ideological or sectarian meaning to contemporaries? In confronting these questions I will, of course, rely heavily on Scholem's analysis and documentation of Sabbatai's career.

A shared phenomenon in the prose fiction of Western literatures in the late nineteenth century is the exploration of individual consciousness dissociated from collective existence. Although individual consciousness had been at the center of the fictional enterprise from the beginning, forming a first condition for the rise of the novel as genre, in the novel of sentiment and in the realistic novel the inner life of individual characters was largely produced dialectically from within the medium of social relations and social ideas. The description of an interior space deserving of attention for its own sake, a space generated by rules of its own which evince no clear or necessary connection to the larger social system, constitutes one of the points at which literature can be said to have become “modernist.” Thereafter, one of the central thematic preoccupations of fiction remains the representation of consciousness itself: memory, reflection, and the manifold operations of the imagination, especially the act of writing.

It has hitherto been generally accepted that the Jews played an active part in the overseas commerce of Venice during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that they were present in the city not only as transients but also as residents, and that they were even confined to a special area. However, a closer investigation reveals that this view constitutes a highly questionable reconstruction of the course of events, based simultaneously on the clear misunderstanding of certain alleged data, and also on dubious philological arguments supported by unproven conjecture and expanded by undocumented speculation.

It is impossible to discuss the social life or the organization of the Jewish community in the Middle Ages without noting the fact that the synagogue was its center. In many cases the synagogue was the only building owned by the community as such, the only institution that actually was at everyone's disposal. It did not always happen to be a special kind of building constructed or dedicated to the worship of God: sometimes one of the city's houses, or an apartment, or a room, would serve as a synagogue. Thus we hear that in the town of Manosque in Southern France—the location of our episodes—there was in the year 1311 a synagogue located at what had formerly been the house of Macip, one of the community's members.