What was Maimonides' attitude toward the typically medieval description of the universe presented at the beginning of his great law code, the Mishneh Torah? Was that account of the physical universe meant only as a statement of the best description of nature available at the time (and thus radically distinct from the halakhic matters which make up the bulk of the Mishneh Torah), or was it meant to be a description of the true nature of the universe as it really is, not subject to revision in the light of new paradigms or new models (and thus essentially similar to the halakhic matters in the text)?

A few years ago, a committee, of which I was a member, was asked to select, for a prize awarded by Moment magazine, the greatest living man and woman scholars in the field of Jewish studies. There was immediate consensus as to the former: who else but Professor Salo W. Baron? It is indicative of his almost legendary range of knowledge, of both primary and secondary sources, in the dozen or more languages in which he was fluent, of the general literature in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences, and of his prodigious productivity that a question frequently asked about him was whether he had assistants in the composition of his numerous works. The answer to that question was a resounding no! His only assistant was his late wife. His unflagging industry was matched only by the independence of his critical judgment.

The impact of Salo Wittmayer Baron on the study of the history of the Jews during the Middle Ages has been enormous. This impact has, in part, been generated by Baron's voluminous writings, in particular his threevolume The Jewish Community and–even more so–his eighteen-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews. Equally decisive has been Baron's influence through his students and his students' students. Almost all researchers here in North America currently engaged in studying aspects of medieval Jewish history can surely trace their intellectual roots back to Salo Wittmayer Baron. In a real sense, many of Baron's views have become widey assumed starting points for the field, ideas which need not be proven or irgued but are simply accepted as givens. Over the next decade or decades, hese views will be carefully identified and reevaluated. At some point, a major study of Baron's legacy, including his influence on the study of medieval Jewish history, will of necessity eventuate. Such a study will have, on the one hand, its inherent intellectual fascination; at the same time, it will constitute an essential element in the next stages of the growth of the field, as it inevitably begins to make its way beyond Baron and his twentieth-century ambience.

During the Middle Ages, each Mediterranean land, from one end of the sea to the other, had its Jewish philosophers. There was one region and one Jewish culture, however, that made no contribution at all to the writing of medieval Jewish philosophy. That was Ashkenazic or Northern European Judaism, the culture of the Jews of England, Northern France, Germany, and Eastern Europe north of the Balkans.

Voltaire's voluminous writings on religion contain, as is well known, a large number of attacks on the Jewish people and Judaism. Historians have offered a variety of explanations for this sustained animosity on the part of a great rationalist and proponent of religious toleration toward a people and a religion which continued, in his own day, to be victimized by unjust persecution. While much remains in dispute, there does seem to be general agreement that Voltaire attacked Judaism at least in part because its most sacred texts constituted the foundation of Christianity, the religion he wished to destroy.

Why has the death of Salo Wittmayer Baron on November 25, 1989 at the age of ninety-four elicited so little comment? No chorus of tributes, memories, or evaluations erupted at the passing of this century's most erudite and prolific Jewish historian, whose standard of excellence almost singlehandedly opened the American university to the field of Jewish studies. The silence, I suspect, tells us as much about the present state of Jewish studies as about the limitations of his work. It is surely not related to the magnitude of his scholarly legacy or its unrelieved and often maddening thematic mode of discourse or even its frequently inelegant style. Sadly, Professor Baron had fallen out of sync with his time long before he died, in part because the one-sidedness of the final ten volumes of the second edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews abandoned the balance and integration of external and internal events vital to his own understanding of Jewish history.

This study presents a new interpretation of tithe references in Scripture. It departs from the conventional view that the tithe is merely a tax levied on the people. Rather it sees the tithe as a partnership or compact with God in which tangible goods are exchanged for intangible ones. Taking the Pentateuch in its entirety as our contextreveals the tithe to bepart of a pattern of reciprocities in which goods are exchanged for divine acceptance, protection, and blessing.

In 1880 the Jewish community of Iraq was forced to confront a sharp increase in antisemitic persecution. Not all of the country's Jews were prepared for this new phenomenon and the result was a number of suicides. The Iraqi rabbinate, both shocked and determined to put an end to the needless taking of life, declared from all the synagogue pulpits that those who commit suicide have no share in the world-to-come. This idea was certainly not unknown to either the masses or the rabbis, who probably believed it to be found somewhere in talmudic literature. However, although it does not appear there, the rabbinic maxim is very well known. Since this notion has played a central role in many rabbinic discussions about the status of suicides, it is worthwhile to trace its origin.

In October 1912, the twenty-four-year-old Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon embarked on a ship in the port of Jaffa, then Palestine, the destination of his trip being Germany, or, to be more exact, the city of Berlin. Agnon left for Germany in the company of Dr. Arthur Ruppin, known as the “father of Zionist settlement in Eres Yisra'el.” The friendship between Agnon and Ruppin had developed in Jaffa, where Agnon had tutored both Ruppin and his wife in Hebrew. And it was probably with the support of Dr. Ruppin, himself a native of Germany and a graduate of a German university, that Agnon decided to leave Palestine, where he had resided for more than three years, to see the world, which in those days meant Berlin.