Beruriah, reputedly the greatest Jewish woman scholar of all times, has figured prominently in anthologies describing the lives and deeds of Jewish sages, and in particular in books and collections dedicated to Jewish women. Most of these presentations are no more than paraphrases of the sources on which they are dependent, accepting their judgments at face value and thus giving an idealized description of the woman Beruriah.

The eminent turn-of-the-sixteenth-century theologian and exegete Isaac Abarbanel was hardly the first Jewish scholar to receive established principles and ways of thinking and a large body of classical Hebrew literature from the past. Nor was he the first to feel the Jewish past's “rich and intimidating legacy” weighing on his intellectual and literary shoulders. Indeed, it has been noted that medieval Jewish writers habitually felt compelled to justify their intellectual-literary existence, and that they often did so using an almost conventional literary genre largely designed for this purpose—the introduction.

Rabbinic responsa can at times furnish an entree into the private and public lives of individuals involved with the judicial system. The case under discussion provides an in-depth portrait of a marriage in twelfth-century Cairo and of a woman's life–in this instance, a woman struggling to maneuver within the strictures of Jewish law and contemporary Judeo-Arabic society.1 The original Judeo-Arabic of the two responsa under discussion, as well as the Hebrew translations, are, no doubt, well known to Judeo-Arabic, Geniza, and Maimonidean scholars alike, as are the basic details to some English readers. Nevertheless, the case is certainly worthy of a separate study of the text in conjunction with a detailed analysis.

In their rhetoric, the ex-conversos who settled in “lands of freedom” outside the Iberian Peninsula tended to emphasize the anguish and lack of freedom they had endured while in the orbit of the Inquisition–in stark contrast to the free and thriving Jewish collective life they had now built outside it. If the Peninsula had been a swamp of “Egyptian idolatry,” the Jewish ex-converso communities in Amsterdam, Venice, Livorno, and London (to name only the most vibrant) were, by implication, encampments on the way to the Holy Land. Yet one aspect of their new condition subtly undermined the ex-conversos' confidence as Jews vis-a-vis the gentile world. Ever sensitive to their image, they were exquisitely aware of their now unambiguous identification in Christian eyes, not with conviction rewarded, not with faith triumphant, but with a defeated and exiled people.

The poet Abba Kovner was a partisan and freedom fighter during World War II (1942–1945), made aliyah in 1945, and published his first long poem, ‘Ad lo ’or (“Until There Was No Light”), in 1947. At the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence he fought on the Egyptian front (1947–48), serving as a cultural officer, or politruk in the Giv'ati Brigade. Preda me-ha-darom (“A Parting from the South”), his second long poem and one of the pivotal works by a modern Hebrew poet, was written against the background of the War of Independence. However, critics have not yet been able to find a fitting place for it in the canon of Hebrew poetry and culture, although several serious attempts have been made. The present study does not refer to every aspect of this complex poem but focuses on one particular point. I contend that “A Parting from the South” implies an attempt by the visionary speaker of the poem to compel the young country, soon after the war, to part from the world of death, from cultic memories of the dead and guilt feelings toward them (the dead in the 1948 war in Israel and the dead in the ghettos of Nazi Europe in World War II). Abba Kovner tries to detach himself, and his readers, from death, to liberate them from the old perspectives.

Until now, the academic study of Lurianic kabbala has largely pursued three roads of inquiry. The first, following Scholem, has been the study of Lurianic kabbala as a mystical and eschatological response to the historical events of the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, an event viewed as the root of the mystical heresy of Shabbtai Tzvi. The second pathway has been the scholarly analysis of Lurianic teaching as the most extreme example of kabbalistic theosophy, surpassing both the Zohar and Cordoverean Kabbala in its intricate and complex delineation of the cosmic world. The third approach has addressed the unusually complicated task of deciphering, categorizing, and pointing out the voluminous manuscripts of Luria's students, a literary oeuvre which is as diverse as it is complex. While all of these are important and contribute to the overall understanding of what is the most influential kabbalistic doctrine since the Zohar, I would like to approach the Lurianic material from a different perspective.