Alexander Samely, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Manchester University, has written what I would describe as one of the most detailed and precise descriptions of the Mishnah's use of scriptural sources. His book, The Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah, a fifteen-chapter work with a glossary of important rabbinic and linguistic terms, two appendices, an excellent bibliography, and thorough indices shows the work of a meticulous scholar and incisive and insightful reader of the Bible and mishnaic corpus.

Hebrew authors of the 1960s and 1970s used the biblical context to hint at their protagonists' religious yearnings, to invest their texts with additional levels of meaning, and to amplify the significance of their plots. In the Hebrew “postmodernist” fiction of the late 1980s and the 1990s, however, biblical allusions are less commonly found, and their functions have fundamentally changed. To examine these different functions, let us first juxtapose two novels, Avram Heffner's Allelim [Alleles], a typical example of the “postmodernist” trend, and Amos Oz's Menuha Nekhona [A Perfect Peace], a representative novel of the Israeli “modernist” school.

This book discusses cults surrounding sainted figures in Islam, and secondarily in Judaism, from many points of view. It urges researchers to go beyond “the traditional methods of interpreting Jewish and Islamic texts,” and to probe the “human dimension of spirituality.” It maintains that studying the practices, beliefs, and idiosyncratic deeds directed to sainted personages—both alive and dead—allows us to explore spiritual paths along which we meet the poor as well as the powerful, and both the theologian and the unschooled believer.

If we were to unravel the foundation of Jewish identity into its primary components, we would discover that beyond the religious commandments, beyond the various national sentiments, beyond the sense of belonging and connection to the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language, beyond certain historical and family memories that uniquely determine the Jewish identity of each individual, the common basis of all Jewish identities, in their various dosages and strengths, comprises several fundamental stories—stories that have shed any clear indicia of historical time and place and have become myths, metastories, which can no longer be changed, only interpreted. These myths, such as the binding of Isaac (the akedah), the story of the exodus and other bible stories, the stories of the destruction of the Temple (and recently, in a certain sense, the Holocaust), have become the infrastructural components of Jewish consciousness and identity, both religious and secular. They have served for millennia as effective ingredients in the preservation of the identity of many Jews, scattered among various lands and continents, in the midst of various peoples and religions and assorted civilizations, and for centuries without being specifically dependent on the clear historical context of a defined territory or language. These myths are the most primary basis for the existence of diaspora Jewish identity, which makes possible the preservation of Jewish identity “outside history,” in the famous phrase of Gershon Scholem, notwithstanding the terrible toll that this existence has taken on the Jewish people in the end. The power of these myths lies in the fact that one's connection to them can be immediate, in all places and at all times, and beyond their original linguistic form; this connection finds succinct expression in the sentence, “In every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt.”

A typographic error appears on page 295 of “The Maskil, the Convert, and the עAgunah: Joseph Perl as a Historian of Jewish Divorce Law,” by Nancy Sinkoff, in the November 2003 issue of AJS Review [2003:27(2), pp. 281–299]. In the indented paragraph from Joseph Perl's manuscript, the original Hebrew phrase “vekhatav”—which is noted in footnote 61 as appearing in the text itself—was elided, leaving an underline with no text. The passage containing the missing Hebrew phrase follows in its entirety:

The two books before us expand the horizons of Maimonidean studies, on the divergent planes of literature and politics. James Diamond's study of Maimonides' use of the Bible and midrash is a tour de force of literary analysis, while Menachem Lorberbaum offers in part a view of Maimonides' attitude to political authority of considerable relevance today.

Professor Jose Luis Lacave collected thirty ketubot (marriage contracts) from various medieval Hispanic kingdoms. These ketubot were found in different libraries and archives. Most of the documents have been published before, some of them by Lacave himself. Three are published here for the first time.

It is perhaps unorthodox to begin a book review by citing something from the acknowledgments. In this case, however, I think it is quite apt. Describing his early foray into the study of Jewish mysticism, Lawrence Fine writes, “It was [Alexander] Altmann who said to me, in one of the earliest conversations I had with him after I arrived at Brandeis, that ‘nobody understands Lurianic Kabbala, not even Scholem,’ referring, of course to the preeminent historian of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.” It is a comment, I imagine, that Scholem may have even agreed with! In any case, Fine's book is an attempt, and one of the best to date, to try to make sense of the labyrinthine world of Lurianic Kabbala. Scholem argued that Lurianic metaphysics was a system developed as a response to historical phenomena, that is, the Jewish expulsion from Spain, and was largely a creative interpretation of, and commentary on, the Zohar. Neither Scholem nor his student Isaiah Tishby devoted any significant space to the historical context of Lurianic Kabbala or its particular cultural milieu, or the possibility of external influences on this mystical circle. Both assumed Luria had historiosophic and not cultural/historic concerns. This trajectory has, until recently, been the accepted framework of Lurianic scholarship.

Can medieval Jewish poetry teach us history? Asked differently, can scholars draw on medieval poetry (piyyutim) to reconstruct historical events? In Beautiful Death, Einbinder narrows down this matter to the case of Ashkenazic martyrological poetry. To answer this question, Einbinder has analyzed over seventy Hebrew poems from northern France, England, and Germany; they span the period following the First Crusade (1096), ending with the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 in Germany and King Philip IV's expulsion of the French Jews in 1306.

Considerable attention has been focused on Habsburg Jewry, especially the Jews of Vienna, before World War I. Several works have also dealt with the Jews of Austria and the other Habsburg successor states during the interwar years. Until now, no books have explored in depth the experiences of Austrian Jewry during the First World War. This past year, however, two books, Marsha L. Rozenblit's Reconstructing National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I and David Rechter's The Jews of Vienna and the First World War, appeared to fill this lacuna in the scholarly literature. Although these books cover the same period and share much the same material, their scope and approach are very different.

This is a translation and slight modification of Dat ve-Ziyyonut: Imutim Rishonim (1990), a Hebrew collection of articles previously published by Yosef Salmon. In this English volume, some sections of the Hebrew edition were omitted, some were altered, and two recent articles were added. The thirteen articles address the period from 1818 (the writings of Hatam Sofer) until 1922 (the founding of Ha-Poءel ha-Mizrachi) and ask how religious Jews—especially those who were drawn toward the hope of restoring the Jewish people to Zion—dealt with the challenges presented by the increasingly secular Jewish national movement. This question is at the center of Salmon's body of research on East European Zionism.

In the last decade or so, new research on Jewish displaced persons in occupied Germany has pushed the traditional boundaries of “Holocaust studies” (1933–1945) toward the postwar period. Indeed, the displaced persons or “DP” experience—the temporary settlement in Germany of the Sheءerith Hapleitah (“Surviving Remnant”) from the liberation of concentration camps in the spring of 1945 to the late 1940s—provides important insights into post-Holocaust Jewish life. The impact of trauma and loss, the final divorce between Jews and East-Central Europe through migration to Israel and the New World, the rise of Zionist consciousness, the shaping of a Jewish national collective in transit, the regeneration of Jewish demography and culture in the DP camps, and the relationships between Jews and Germans in occupied Germany are some of the many themes explored by recent DP historiography—by now a subfield of postwar Jewish history.

Historians of the Third Reich have long noted that Nazi Germany's actions on the battlefield and occupation policies were governed both by conventional military and radical ideological considerations. Much attention has been devoted to the problem of separating the two strands analytically, to determining which actions and policies should be labeled as primarily one or the other and which elements within the regime thought and behaved mainly according to conventional versus ideological notions. In recent years it has become common to place German military operations before June 1941 under the “conventional” rubric and to date the “ideological” war from the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began in that month. On the other hand, whereas the German army was once widely thought to have constituted a bastion of conventional thinking even after the ideological war had been launched, scholars have increasingly implicated it in the perpetration of ideologically rooted crimes (particularly the murder of Jews on the eastern front).

Zionism—the Israeli national constitutive myth that powerfully shapes that country's politics, society, and culture—is currently under attack from Israeli social scientists. An academic–political stream known as post-Zionism is reexamining and questioning nearly all of Israeli society's “sacred cows” as it exposes the coercive, silencing, and exclusionary force of the Zionist master narrative and its contribution to intense conflicts and cultural and social distortions. This is the context in which the book at hand should be read. It critically examines the Zionist ethos from a cultural anthropological perspective, and explores the cultural mediums through which the Zionist narrative passes as it undergoes a process of fragmentation through simulation.

Our Lives are but Stories is a welcome and appealing addition to the small but valuable corpus of studies of Jewish women whose ethnic heritages, as much as their Judaism, shape their life experiences and their narratives telling of those experiences. Joining books such as Lisa Gilad's Ginger and Salt: Yemeni Jewish Women in an Israeli Town (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989); Jael Silliman's Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women's Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001); Joelle Bahloul's Le Culte de la Table Dressée: Rites et Traditions de la Table Juive Algérienne (Paris: A. M. Métailié: Diffusion, Presses universitaires de France, 1983); Rachel Simon's Change Within Tradition Among Jewish Women in Libya (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); and my own Women As Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem (New York: Oxford University Press 1992), Schely-Newman's Our Lives are but Stories makes a substantial contribution to the study of Jewish women of Asia and North Africa.

The scope of research devoted to the entrance of European Jews into the modern civic realm has expanded steadily in the last two decades. Historians have turned their attention to communities formerly considered only marginally important because of their small size, their location at the periphery of Europe's most significant political and cultural developments, or their failure to correspond to the models of emancipation and enlightenment derived from the historical experience of French and German Jews. This new direction in Jewish historical writing has generated an ever-increasing body of social–historical data and is marked by a growing emphasis on regional factors, particularly urban–rural differences, and a new appreciation for class and gender as categories of analysis. The result—a more highly nuanced picture of modernization—has firmly discredited the dominant Germanocentric perspective favored by previous generations of historians. Now, thanks to the publication of Lois Dubin's outstanding book, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste, our understanding of the forces that shaped modern Jewish society and culture has been advanced appreciably. Dubin has succeeded in producing a balanced reassessment of much of the conventional thinking about periodization, modernization, and the role of Haskalah and Emancipation.

In Beyond Auschwitz, Michael Morgan has in effect woven together two different kinds of narratives. The first narrative is utterly ordinary; thankfully, the second is utterly extraordinary.

Comparative analysis, especially in the field of religious studies, is widely recognized as among the most difficult of intellectual tasks. How does one do justice to the complexity of both subjects? How does one set the terms of the comparison in a way that accurately captures both similarities and differences? How does one place those similarities and differences in a broader context so that their significance comes to the fore? And how does one present both halves of the comparison in a way that will be equally accessible to readers presumed to be familiar with only one or the other? These challenges are still more formidable when the subjects being compared are “Jewish bioethics” and “Catholic bioethics,” each of which draws on a long ethical tradition, encompasses a wide range of views, and continues to evolve.

Many of the pioneers and settlers who came to America held the Bible in their right hands and were strongly inspired by this “Good Book.” They believed they had come to the “New Promised Land,” and consequently gave Biblical names to the new towns and villages, as well as to their children. It was, therefore, almost natural that the remote land in the east, known as the Holy Land, Palestine, the Promised Land, or The Land of Israel, had, and probably still has, a very special place in American culture and society.

Jewish music study is a loosely unified field that brings together strands from several scholarly traditions. Researchers trained in historical musicology typically use document study, note analysis, and contemporary aesthetic writings to examine how questions of “Jewishness” manifest themselves in the works of selected composers. Ethnomusicologists frequently utilize ethnographic fieldwork methods developed for studying musical practices of Jewish communities within a broad cultural and symbolic system. Jewish music researchers in Israel commonly focus on comparative cultural projects intended to illuminate stylistic or song-based pathways of transmission from one age or culture to the next. Cultural theorists tend to situate music as a medium for negotiating the borders between Jews and other groups. And with the lay public in mind, specialists and nonspecialists alike have generated numerous popular textbooks claiming to cover “Jewish music.” Each of these disciplines asks different questions about the nature of sound within Jewish contexts; yet central to all is the question of how the sound itself reflects concepts of Jewish life—providing researchers with a richly evocative common ground for substantive and interdisciplinary study.