Rabbi Ḥayim (Chaim) Hirschensohn (1857–1935) was one of only a handful of Jewish thinkers to work out a Jewish political theology, and on account of his progressive stances he became a favorite of liberal circles within contemporary Judaism. Therefore, a passage in his book Malki Bakodesh, in which he expresses clear opposition to universal suffrage, “invited” mitigating interpretations. Yet, a survey of Hirschensohn’s various writings reveals that they contain a trend of political elitism. Is this surprising? Hirschensohn’s progressiveness notwithstanding, the article argues that his elitist sentiments are rooted in three major intellectual trends within modern Judaism: Mitnagdism, Haskalah, and Zionism. In the writings of seminal thinkers in each of these movements, we find political elitism and reservations about government “by the people.” Hirschensohn’s personal history positioned him at the confluence of these trends, and so his elitist opinions should be viewed as the outgrowth of these intellectual traditions.

The uncovering of manuscripts over the last one hundred years has repeatedly changed how early Christian history is told. With no signs of this trend abating, this article seeks to take stock of how scholars respond to manuscript discoveries by focusing on three debates over the orthodoxy of an early Christian figure that extend over two hundred and fifty years. New manuscript evidence sparked no less than three debates over the christological views of the Syriac author Jacob of Serugh (d. 520/521) from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In the first debate, the arrival of manuscripts in Western Europe led to a conflict between the Maronite scholars who viewed Jacob as a Chalcedonian thinker and certain textual evidence that suggested otherwise. The second debate began in the late nineteenth century after manuscripts from Egypt arrived in London that contained Jacob’s extensive epistolary corpus, which includes clear expressions of non-Chalcedonian, miaphysite christology. A new acquisition by the Vatican Library in the mid-twentieth century featured a previously unknown homily that included two lines that could be interpreted in a Chalcedonian manner. This inspired several Western scholars to dig yet deeper into the manuscripts to resolve this long-standing debate over his christological views. The focused analysis of the pendulum swings initiated by manuscript discoveries in the scholarly discourse surrounding Jacob of Serugh serves as a mirror for self-reflection on the way that scholars discuss a past whose many unknowns still await discovery.

Paul’s Jewishness has often acted as a pivot in scholarship about the relationship between Christianity and Judaism, especially in recent conversation about the date and duration of the so-called “Parting of the Ways.” Too little attention has been paid, however, to who represented Paul as Jewish (or not) and why. I examine the late antique reception of Paul’s ethnic identity in Epiphanius of Cyprus, heresiologist, bishop, and someone for whom representation of Jewishness often served as a foil for the manufacture of orthodoxy. I argue that for Epiphanius, when Paul’s ethnic identity is relevant at all, the focus falls on an Israelite, Benjaminite Paul. Paul’s Jewishness becomes peripheral. Building on this observation, I suggest that we must understand even the reification of Jewishness familiar to current scholarship as only one of the late antique Christian behaviors that governed identification as Israelite.

This paper analyzes two transformative conceptions of qedushah (holiness) in medieval Jewish thought, Moses Maimonides’s and Moses Nahmanides’s. Maimonides reduces qedushah to the Mosaic commandments which he reconceives as communal institutions to constrain bodily desires and promote intellectualist values and as training for perfected individuals to de-corporealize themselves in imitation of God. Nahmanides argues that Maimonides’s legal reduction of qedushah leads to the absurd conclusion that the perfectly scrupulous law-abiding scoundrel who exploits loopholes in the law is qadosh! He therefore reconceives qedushah as a complement to the Mosaic commandments intended to counter the problem of the scoundrel. Thus qedushah is re-born as a corrective to abuse of the Law. Nahmanides then proposes two ways to achieve this goal: i) by rabbinic enactment of more laws to fill in (loop) holes in the Law and ii) by cultivating a virtue-oriented, non-legal conception of holiness as a character-trait that leads agents to act properly and spontaneously without legislation. For Maimonides the ultimate state of qedushah is the dis-embodied state of the intellect, for Nahmanides it is a state in which the whole person, body and soul, clings to the deity.

This article traces the diachronic uses of the literary motif of “relics coming from Constantinople to monasteries in the East” in Syriac hagiography. Although this motif was seen in Syriac literature as early as the sixth century, there seems to be an increase in the employment of these stories around the twelfth century in saints’ lives local to northern Mesopotamia. In light of two texts—the Life of Abḥay and the Life of Aḥā—the article argues that stories about Constantinopolitan relics (martyrs’ bones or pieces of the True Cross) were oriented toward different modes of remembering Byzantium in the Syriac Church in the Middle Ages. The article further argues that these stories also created space to reflect on the Syriac Church’s relations with the Armenian Church in the medieval Near East. The article thus shows the power of narrative in creating cultural memory, building communal identity, and catalyzing religious rivalry.

This article includes translation of a “new” Vision of Daniel as it survived, albeit incomplete. It reflects a “meeting point” between three monotheistic religions in the ninth and tenth centuries CE. A comparative study of the work enables the reconstruction of its missing parts. The Vision may have been composed in the area where al-Muʿtaṣim battled Theophilos in the 830s CE, namely, northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia. An “updated” appendix was added around 1000 CE. Towards the end of the Vision, exact times are replaced with “flexible times,” a moderate expression of the cosmic changes found in similar eschatological works. The two anti-messiahs described, constructed as integrations of Jewish-Christian-Muslim traditions of the apocalyptical devils, reflect the shifting identities of messianic figures, who will reveal themselves once again (Parousia), albeit as demonic antichrists. One of the two is an inversion of the Christian image of Moses/Jesus, whereas the second is Armilus.

This article examines the development and transformation of the holy spirit within Jewish mysticism. It begins with a brief analysis of primary trends concerning the holy spirit in biblical, rabbinic, and medieval Jewish texts that served as crucial material for the holy spirit’s ascendence in sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism. Following, it examines the writings of leading Jewish mystics: Moses Cordovero, Elijah de Vidas, and Ḥayyim Vital, who resided in the remote Galilean town of Safed. These luminaries each developed the concept of the holy spirit along a spectrum of pneumatic, fusionary, mystical, and revelatory experiences. Ultimately, they transformed the holy spirit into the peak experience of Jewish mystical life— experienced as prophecy, sanctification, and embodiment. This article highlights an important, yet understudied, Jewish mystical phenomenon.

The American Puritan layman Samuel Sewall (d. 1730) is perhaps best known as a diarist and as a repentant judge in the Salem witchcraft trials. But he was also the author of Phaenomena quaedam apocalyptica (first edition 1697), a work which argued that the New Jerusalem would arise in Mexico City. Sewall’s unusual millennial doctrine may seem undeserving of study, for no other American Puritan thought that the New Jerusalem would first appear in Mexico City or anywhere else in New Spain. Yet when properly contextualized, the Mexican millennium is worth investigating for two reasons. First, it accentuates what the American Puritan millenarian mainstream, best exemplified by John Cotton, Increase Mather, and Cotton Mather, believed about the coming kingdom. Second, the Mexican millennium, like the mainstream position, challenges the academic claim that American Puritan millenarians characteristically believed that they were destined to inaugurate the millennial kingdom in New England.

This study examines the late seventeenth-century reception of enthusiasm in England in the context of the contemporary epistemological debate. Challenging characterizations of responses to enthusiasm as partitioned along the rationalist-empiricist divide, I show how parallel critiques of enthusiasm by natural philosophers and theologians suggest shared epistemic commitments across methodological and disciplinary boundaries, reflecting evolving concerns in the broader epistemological debate, rather than fixed, domain- or ideology-specific positions. By challenging a crude rationalist-empiricist division, this study aligns itself with previous literature, while also departing from it, in that it locates in the critique of enthusiasm a previously under-examined facet of that debate. By showing that both natural philosophers and theologians rejected enthusiasm for its irrationality, this work also sharpens the current understanding of the epistemic significance of enthusiasm, in that it identifies the crux of the critique of enthusiasm in its lack of reason, and not of an empirical foundation.

Job’s burnt offerings for his sons and daughters followed by their death (Job 1) resembles the sequence of Aaron’s burnt offerings for himself and his sons followed by the death of his oldest sons (Lev 8–10). Within this common sequence of events, the two stories share a cluster of important, identical lexemes. Although it is not impossible that these features could have resulted unintentionally from a shared scribal culture, the textual evidence is strong enough to indicate that the scribe of Job’s prologue alludes to the priestly inauguration story of Leviticus 8–10. By reading Job after Leviticus, one sees the sharp contrast between the divine silence following Job’s intermediary sacrifices (Job 1:5, 18–19) and the divine response both to Aaron’s and to Nadab and Abihu’s sacrifices (Lev 9:22–10:3). This study clarifies how the story of Job rejects a mechanistic understanding not only of traditional wisdom, but of the Priestly cultic tradition of ancient Israel and Judah.

The question of how to approach the Hebrew Bible as a source for the histories we write of ancient Israel continues to divide scholars. This study responds to such concerns by pursuing an approach informed by a historicized view of knowledge, or a framework in which the claims we make are understood to be reflective of the eras in which they are realized. What this line of research encourages, I argue, are historical investigations into the underlying modes of knowing that would have contributed to the stories told in the biblical writings. Since knowledge about the past is itself historical, this study contends that it is necessary to situate such claims in time, examining the normative assumptions of an era that establish the parameters by which this knowledge is organized and granted credibility. The epistemic conditions that gave rise to the stories recounted in the Hebrew Bible are as much an object of historical interest, on this view, as the stories themselves for assessments of what evidence they might offer.

Starting from the concept of divine patience in Rom 9:22, this article argues that Paul employs the potter/clay metaphor not (as often interpreted) to defend God’s right to arbitrary choice but rather as an appeal to what Abraham Heschel called divine pathos—the idea that God’s choices are impacted by human actions. The potter/clay imagery in Rom 9:20–23 thus serves to highlight the dynamic and improvisational way the God of Israel interacts with Israel and, by extension, all of creation.

Maimonides opened almost all of his books with the verse “in the name of the Lord, the God of the world” (Gen 21:33). This verse describes the nature of Abraham’s calling, which Maimonides interprets, both in the Mishneh Torah and in the Guide of the Perplexed, as an effort to persuade others to abandon their idolatrous perceptions and affirm the uniqueness of God. There is, however, a difference between the way Maimonides describes Abraham and his calling in the Mishneh Torah and their portrayal in the Guide of the Perplexed. In the former, Abraham is presented as a philosopher; in the latter, as a biblical prophet. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides’s description of Abraham revolves around a verse that describes the “God of the world”; in the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides adds verses in which Abraham mentions “heaven.” In this article, I shall examine these differences and suggest that they represent developments and shifts in Maimonides’s own philosophical position.

Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1779) was an important rabbi and scholar in the area of Hamburg. One of his works, Mitpaḥat Sefarim (“Book Cloth,” Altona, 1768), is a critique of the Zohar (“Book of Splendor”), a canonical Jewish mystical text attributed to the ancient scholar Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai (ca. 2nd cent. CE). In Mitpaḥat Sefarim, Emden casts doubt upon the Zohar’s provenance, authorship, and age. This critique has led some to identify Emden with the early beginnings of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, as an opponent of mysticism. However, Emden took mystical sources very seriously, both in the spiritual realm, and, as this article shows, even in his writings on religious law. This article examines the perceived contradiction in Emden’s thinking, and proposes a view of Emden as an early modern printer and critic with a unique perspective, rather than a confused precursor of modern ideas.