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.

Recent decades have seen a flowering of research into the political tradition and culture of the Jewish people. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undertake an investigation of key rabbinic discussions of a central biblical and historical institution: the monarchy. This study opens with a close reading of the sources and attempts to understand them in their conceptual and literary contexts, moves on to a consideration of possible historical contexts and repercussions, and concludes with some reflections on the relation of our topic to the messianic element in Israel's faith.

Perhaps the most famous section of the second half of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities is the story of Alexander the Great and the Jews (AJ 11.302–47). It consists of three strands: a story about Manasses, Sanballat, and Alexander; a story about Jaddus and Alexander; and historical data about Philip II, Darius III, and Alexander the Great. In the first strand Manasses, a brother of the high priest Jaddus, marries the daughter of Sanballat, satrap of Samaria, and as a result is ejected from Jerusalem and flees to his father-in-law. Sanballat promises to build a new temple for him and his Jewish followers and intends to ask Darius to authorize the project. When Alexander is victorious, Sanballat transfers his allegiance to the Macedonian conqueror and receives permission from him to build a temple in Samaria. In the second strand, Alexander demands the submission of the Jews but Jaddus, the high priest, remains loyal to Darius.Furious at this rebuff, Alexander marches on Jerusalem. Encouraged by a dream, the high priest and the Jews greet Alexander outside the city. The conqueror of the world bows down before Jaddus and declares that it was Jaddus who had appeared to him in a dream three years earlier and had encouraged him to launch his expedition against Persia. Amidst general rejoicing, Alexander enters the temple, sacrifices to the God of Israel, and bestows gifts upon the Jews.

Contemporary Jewish historiography has tended to ignore the private side of the struggle for Jewish integration into European society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, most work has concentrated on public efforts to achieve acceptance and respectability—programs to modernize Jewish education, reform Jewish worship, normalize Jewish occupations, and apply critical standards and methods to Jewish scholarship. In particular, historians have focused their attention on that small group of notables who managed the affairs of the organized Jewish community, that is, those wealthy Jews who everywhere directed the campaign for emancipation and the modernization of Jewish life and later the defense of Judaism in the face of a renewed antisemitism.Needless to say, this group hardly constituted a majority of the community in any locality and in many places probably not even a majority of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. Yet many of these well-to-do Jews who took no active part in communal affairs were as eager as the communal notables to gain acceptance for themselves outside the Jewish community. Indeed, in most cases their ties to Judaism and the Jewish community were weaker; conversely, their desire for integration into non-Jewish spheres usually stronger.

[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.

Our tale opens in some little town in the Pale of Settlement between the 1880s and World War I. A well-spoken, well-dressed young man appears and courts an attractive girl of a family belonging to the great majority of the Jewish townspeople—that is, impoverished and burdened with many children. The unknown suitor offers charm and gifts, and speaks knowingly of the great places he has seen and where he has a good business—Paris, Johannesburg, London, or New York. Will the girl accompany him westward and become his bride once they reach their destination.He does not want to stay long enough in town to marry publicly, since he might be seized for military conscription. The girl, excited by the prospect, implores her parents to give their consent to this proposal. She feels she loves this young man. With him, the bleak life and dismal future in the town will be exchanged at a stroke for happiness and prosperity in a great, distant city. Every month a few young townspeople were leaving, mainly for America. Already there were many more marriageable girls in town than there were young men for them. How could such a chance be thrown aside? Might it ever recur? If the girl wondered why of all the numerous poor girls in town she was enjoying these attentions, she would answer in her own mind by complimenting herself on her prettiness. Her parents, or her surviving parent or step-parents, gave their consent.

Against the background of the dramatic upsurge of liberalism, radicalism, and freethought in religion within the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century, American Reform Judaism and Unitarianism made impressive strides. By the 1880s, Reform Judaism had become the preeminent form of Judaism in both institutional growth and organizational cohesiveness; it remained the favored religious pattern of the elite leadership of American Jewry well into the twentieth century. For its part, Unitarianism by the 1880s had spread beyond the confines of New England, featured a revitalized Western branch, the Western Unitarian Conference, and was experiencing an articulate denominational consciousness.

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.

The developments triggered or accelerated by the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881–1882 in Russia form a panorama of East European Jewish history at the end of the century: Zionism, the Bund, mass emigration and mass pauperization. The role of Hebrew literature in responding to these pogroms as well as to the later round of violence between 1903 and 1905 is significant for two reasons. In its own setting, Hebrew literature is crucial to an analysis of the consciousness of the period because it represents the response of an important segment of the intelligentsia of Russian Jewry, namely, those who associated themselves with national revival and its cultural medium, Hebrew. Hebrew fiction and poetry on the pogroms are also significant when studied in a vertical perspective, that is, in relationship to an evolved and elaborate set of traditions of response to catastrophe in Hebrew sources from the Bible and midrash through the piyyutim, chronicles, and consolation texts of the Middle Ages. Hebrew writing between 1881 and 1905 both partakes of that tradition and rebels against it, and in so doing reconstitutes the tradition; and it is that new tradition which must be confronted, evaded, or subverted when the literary imagination faces the more destructive pogroms of the World War I period and later the Holocaust itself.

In 1638 a book entitled Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell'inclita città di Venetia (A Discourse on the State of the Jews, Particularly Those Dwelling in the Illustrious City of Venice), written by the prominent Venetian Rabbi, Simone Luzzatto, was published. This Italian work, 184 quarto size pages in length, was addressed to the Venetian patriciate which constituted the governing body of the city. On the basis of information contained in a seventeenth-century Hebrew chronicle first published in 1949, it appears that it had been written in order to avert an expulsion which threatened the Jews of Venice in 1636–37.

With the passage of time the notion of original sin became a matter of increasing concern for medieval Jewish critics of Christianity. The foundation of this criticism was laid by the earlier polemical writers, specifically those of the period from the second half of the twelfth through the early fourteenth centuries. The later authors, from the late fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, incorporated practically all of the arguments raised by their predecessors and added new criticism reflecting their greater familiarity with Christian beliefs and literature. The earlier polemicists, while approaching their task from a rational, “common sense” perspective, relied heavily on Hebrew biblical and, to a lesser degree, New Testament passages. The later writers reflected a greater intellectual independence of scriptural sources. Because the earlier works are generally structured as running commentaries of scriptural texts relevant to Christianity, their treatment of original sin, and other Christian doctrines for that matter, tends to be unfocused.3 The issues that are raised emerge piecemeal as the salient biblical passages are interpreted. The later works tend to be built on discussions of concepts. Consequently, a number of arguments are coalesced into coherent analyses. Such structural differences are the results of different patterns of inquiry. The earlier textually oriented critiques are, on the whole, products of the Franco-German polemical writers.

The exchange of letters between Abba Mari of Montpellier (fl. 1300) and Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret of Barcelona (ca. 1235–1310), collected in the book Minfiat qena'ot [Zealous Offering], opens with a controversy over medical astrology. While the outcome of this controversy, the ban issued in the summer of 1305 in Barcelona against premature study of philosophy, constitutes a well-known event in Jewish history, it is not at all that clear why Abba Mari chose to attack his adversaries, the students of philosophy, by raising the issue of their alleged medical-astrological practices. The data in his first letters to Ibn Adret hint at what might have been the extent of these practices in Montpellier of 1300 as well as who the personalities that he had in mind might have been.From the very first letter we learn that at the source of all the trouble were some Jewish physicians in Montpellier–the name of Isaac de Lattes is specifically mentioned–who employed an astrological talisman which was supposed to bring relief to an ailing right kidney. To his great astonishment, Abba Mari came to learn in about the year 1300 that Ibn Adret was not ready to condemn such a practice and that he actually approved of it, while Abba Mari considered it to be straightforward idolatry.

The period from the middle of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century marks a transition in Jewish intellectual history in the Italian Renaissance characterized by the decline of Jewish rationalism and the rise of kabbalah. This process reached its culmination with the printing of Sefer ha-Zohar in 1558–59, an event accompanied by heated controversy on many fronts. During these years we find those thinkers who unambiguously profess their allegiance to one camp or the other, but we also find many whose allegiance is at least superficially ambivalent.

Abraham Abulafia's attempt to meet the pope has preoccupied several scholars who have given various explanations to the aim of this meeting. The present study describes the event which preceded this attempt and interprets it in a new way. According to this explanation, Abulafia was interested in a discussion with the pope on Judaism as it was understood by Abulafia, namely, a religion which focuses upon the completion of the names of God. Abulafia might have been aware of a similar train of thought in Franciscan circles, where meditation on the name of Jesus was coming into vogue.

The misinterpretations of some scholars of Abulafia's mission are discussed, and the history of the false conception, according to which Abulafia met the pope and accepted Christian views in order to save his life, are traced.