Following the lead of Spinoza, most of us have come to regard the sequence of Hebrew narrative from Genesis through Kings as a unified literary composition. It tells the story of Israel and its God from the creation of sky and land through the exile of Israel from its particular land. Although the anonymous narrator focuses on the fate of his people, he virtually always tries to identify with YHWH's point of view. For this reason, and possibly others, the narrator submerges his own identify and background. Unlike his near-contemporary Herodotus, who begins his Histories by introducing himself and his explicit agenda, the Hebrew author speaks from a perspective as wide as the cosmos. He would seem to assume the authority of God and give voice to a divinely certified account of his people's historical experience to (one assumes) his own community.

The analytic tools of anthropology originally were fashioned on smallscale tribal groups that possessed no written traditions. After World War II, as anthropologists became involved in the study of complex societies in different “developing areas,” the discipline began to relate its findings to the concerns of other fields. Simultaneously, scholars from other social and humanist disciplines, who previously had assumed that anthropologists focused only on “primitives,” began to incorporate anthropological methods and concepts into their tool kits. As part of these general trends, there were anthropologists who turned to the study of Jewish society and culture. One natural expression of this trend has been the study of contemporary Jewish communities. There are now dozens of studies of Jewish life from one or another anthropological perspective, most of them dealing mainly with Jews in the United States of Ashkenazi background or with communities in Israel whose origins were in the Middle East. A very different trend is found in the analysis of classic texts, notably the Bible but with some attention being given to rabbinic literature, using structuralism and related methodologies. At first initiated by anthropologists who were not themselves specialists in the biblical period, these approaches have now been adopted by some students of ancient Judaism, who combine them with the more standard methods used in research on biblical and rabbinic texts.

As Jacob Neusner and others have argued, before talmudic stories can be evaluated as historical evidence we must ask who the original authors were, what were their motives, and who was their intended audience. Even once we obtain the “original” version of a story, we do not necessarily have access to the historical event which gave rise to the story. For perhaps accounts of the historical event have been colored, even distorted beyond recognition, by the needs, desires, and beliefs of the original authors. Or perhaps the stories they transmit are fabrications, invented by students or later editors with a particular goal in mind.

The “killer wife” superstition, by which we mean the belief that the husbands of certain women are doomed to die, is examined here as it appears in Jewish sources from the Bible to Maimonides. The many pertinent developments in post-talmudic-midrashic sources require a separate study. For this period we confine our discussion to Maimonides, the most significant medieval spokesman on the subject. Our topic is a popular theme in folklore. Here our primary interest is in how the religion of Israel reacted to the superstition, both conceptually and practically.

For several years I have been trying to analyze Muslim historical thinking and the manner in which it affected perceptions of the Jewish past a past which Muslims fully appropriated as part of their own historical experiences and world-view. Put somewhat differently, I have been trying to understand the process by which a heritage common to both monotheistic faiths could and did become a bone of contention as well as a basis of mutual understanding. This linkage between Muslim self-reflection and the creation of a larger monotheist historiography is crucial to the formation of Muslim attitudes toward “the other,” the polemical discourse against Jews and Judaism, and, more generally, Muslim-Jewish relations throughout the Middle Ages. The present study is culled from a project on Muslim uses of the Jewish past.

What is Jewish ethics? Is there a distinct academic discipline under the rubric of “Jewish studies” or “Jewish philosophy” which can properly be called “Jewish ethics”? The answer to these two related questions is more elusive than one might think. Indeed, it has recently been argued that there really is no such thing as Jewish ethics at all. On the one hand, if a principle of action is truly ethical, then it must be universal, and if it is universal, it cannot be distinctively Jewish. On the other hand, if Jewish ethics is really halakhah in disguise, as so many writers in the field of medical ethics, for example, seem to believe, then why bother with the disguise if one can get the real thing?

The philosophy of Martin Buber has attracted more attention, both favorable and critical, than has any other modern Jewish philosophy. None of the criticism leveled against Buber's thought is as thorough and philosophically informed as that found in Steven Katz's seminal essay, “Martin Buber's Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal.” In this essay Katz argues that Buber adopts a Kantian architectonic to provide the metaphysical underpinnings for his philosophy of dialogue. In Katz's own words, I contend, however, that Buber ultimately rejects the Kantian architectonic that Katz attributes to him. A close reading of all the appropriate texts will demonstrate that there is only superficial warrant for considering Buber's use of some Kantian ideas to be ultimately determinative. Buber's rejection of central Kantian positions must be weighed alongside the evidence that Katz marshals to erect his thesis.

My aim in this essay is to analyze a section of Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem largely ignored by previous readers. The treatise has generally been recognized as epochal in the history of modern Judaism, and Altmann, Guttmann, Rawidowicz, and Rotenstreich have therefore focused quite understandably on that which made it so: the novel political theory set forth in part 1, or the controversial assertion near the start of part 2 that Judaism “knows of no revealed religion” in the common sense of that term, its uniqueness consisting only in the “divine legislation” revealed to the Jews at Sinai. Only Heinemann has made a serious attempt to unravel Mendels sohn's tortuous explanation of the “divine legislation” as “a kind of living script,” and his often excellent account is marred by explicit Orthodox apologetic and utter reverence for Mendelssohn, both of which prevent him from seeing just how radical a theory of the commandments Jerusalem sets forth.3 Mendelssohn coyly terms most of the section devoted to this theory a “digression.“ Altmann notes charitably that it contains not only “some flights of speculation” but “the least substantiated of all [the] theories Mendelssohn ever advanced.”

Y. L. Teller's poetry underwent radical transformations in the 1930s, and its shifting forms were representative of the age. Influenced by the introspectivists, Teller excluded proper names, identifiable places, and definite time from his early poems. By the end of the decade, however, he had developed a style that drew heavily from news reports. The relationship between poetry and journalism became a matter of dispute in American Yiddish literature during these years, when Arn Glants-Leyeles and Yankev Glatshteyn were among the leading poets who dirtied their hands with news-print.

The essential argument of Lawrence Perlman's critique of my essay “Martin Buber's Epistemology: A Critical Appraisal” is that I have misunderstood Buber insofar as I claim that his dialogical philosophy is largely Kantian in structure. In response it must be said that Perlman has worked hard to make his case—but finally it is unconvincing, even seriously misleading, because it rests on a triple misunderstanding, i.e., a misunderstanding of Kant, of Buber, and of Katz.