Paul opens his First Epistle to the Corinthians with the exhortation “Now I appeal to you, brothers [and sisters], … that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1:10). This plea is strikingly similar to a passage in Sifre Deuteronomy 96, where the words lo titgodedu are interpreted as “Do not be made into gatherings/factions [ʾagudot]; rather, be all of you one gathering [ʾagudah].” Analyzing these sources in depth, this article argues that Paul was familiar with this early rabbinic midrash in an oral form. It also explores the possibility that Paul used another early rabbinic tradition on unity, which is found in the Mekhilta de-miluʾim section of the Sifra. If Paul indeed knew certain rabbinic oral traditions, then he was an independent interpreter of Scripture, who read Scripture in the original Hebrew. Further, even if Paul's audience consisted primarily of gentiles, the legal norms he sought to institute among them were based on Jewish traditions. Finally, Paul follows his exhortation against schismata with the names of specific groups in Corinth, which demonstrates that he understood the tannaitic tradition as a normative principle, meant to be applied to specific disagreements. If so, other first-century Jews also likely understood lo titgodedu as a concrete halakhic prohibition.

This article offers a new approach to Profayt Duran's Reproach of the Gentiles (Kelimat ha-goyim), emphasizing the particular place accorded to Paul in this work and reading it against the background of converso Paulinism. This article integrates the idea of Paul the Jew in Reproach of the Gentiles with the broader ideology that Duran developed regarding the forced converts (ʾanusim) in his other writings. To some extent, based on the ambivalence in his views and his divided personality, Paul could serve as a model for those conversos now required to develop, like him, a divided identity and ambivalent positions. Thus, Profayt Duran should be considered a forerunner of converso Paulinism.

Hunting scenes are common in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and are understood as allegories of the Jew, usually represented as a hare or a deer, being persecuted by the Christian, shown as a hunter and his dogs. This article will discuss a hunt scene from the Worms Maḥzor, an Ashkenazic illuminated prayer book produced in 1272, probably in Würzburg. At the top of folio 130r, an illumination of the piyyut (liturgical poem) “ʾAyelet ʾahavim” (the loving hind, or doe) for Shavuot displays a deer being hunted by a devilish hunter and his dogs. Examining the illustration in the context of contemporary textual evidence, I shall demonstrate that the deer in the Worms Maḥzor portrays the Torah itself being persecuted by the hunter, who can be understood not only as a Christian or Esau, but also as Jesus.

This paper explores the visual sources that inspired Felix Salten's Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923), and its postpublication legacy in America, Poland, India, Israel, and Russia. While both Jewish and non-Jewish artists embraced the hunted deer motif as their own “national folktale,” the Jewish roots of the visual motif are critical to understanding the revisions and adaptations of the tale in the mid-twentieth century. The case of the myriad revamps of Bambi demonstrates that the nationalist idiom was so elastic in the mid-twentieth century that it functioned as an aesthetic mode rather than an a priori category of identity. At the center of the analysis is the contention that Jewish artists, filmmakers, and writers used the aesthetic properties of the nationalist idiom not only to forge a path to political agency but also to build a shelter from the nation-state.

This essay treats the contradictions that beset Samuel Hirsch's Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden in order to clarify the nature of the study of modern Jewish thought. I begin by examining how Emil Fackenheim presents the contradiction in Hirsch's thought as evidence of the incompatible assumptions underlying dominant strands of modern philosophy and “authentic” Jewish theology. Agreeing with Fackenheim that Hirsch's work is contradictory, this essay diverges on both the nature of this contradiction and its implications for Jewish thought. I claim that the argument of Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden founders as a result of Hirsch's refusal to choose between three different, and ultimately incompatible, strategies for articulating the relationship between God and human beings. I then conclude by exploring the implications of the collapse of Hirsch's position with regard to the dispute between theocentrists and ethical monotheists and for the field of modern Jewish thought more broadly.

Among Maimonides's many statements about extrascriptural laws in rabbinic literature, none has attracted as much attention as principle 2 in his Book of the Commandments. Modern scholars have largely understood this text to claim that very few of the laws found in rabbinic literature are Sinaitic in origin and of biblical status. Yet, until the twentieth century, principle 2 was primarily read as distinguishing between revealed laws that constitute enumerated commandments and revealed laws that do not. In fact, neither reading is consistent with other Maimonidean statements. By contextualizing principle 2 within the Book of the Commandments, this essay reconsiders Maimonides's enumeration of the commandments and argues that many of the problems that principle 2 was designed to address, and that it also generated, resulted from the incongruity of his project of enumerating precisely 613 commandments alongside his understanding of revelation as a corpus that included not only the Written Torah but innumerable extrascriptural traditions as well. An appendix evaluates pertinent aspects of the most recent monograph dedicated to Maimonides's scriptural hermeneutics.

During the mid-1990s the Australian literary scene was shaken by controversy over issues of antisemitism and Holocaust representation in Helen Demidenko's debut novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. In 2017, Darville reissued the novel. At a time when debate is raging over the nature and limits of freedom of expression and the status of words and facts, this was a provocative move. This article revisits The Hand in order to resolve the issues of literary antisemitism and freedom of speech that it raised in 1994 and continues to raise today. I apply Avishai Margalit's notion of an “ethics of memory” to the autofictional text in order to develop a theory of an “ethics of narration” in literary fiction. This narrative ethics enables distinctions to be made in relation to truth claims and fictionality, which were opaque in Demidenko's original autofiction and remain unresolved in the reissued version.

The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the writers of the Bavli to hold their own scholastic tendencies up to critique while also drawing protective boundaries around the analytical direction their legal culture has taken. I also read the passages together to demonstrate that the Bavli functions as a unified literary work in previously unacknowledged ways. These episodes form a sort of nonlinear plot, a web of stories that produce a character with his own “history.” There may be no historical rabbinic nuisance named R. Yirmiyah, but there is certainly a constructed literary one, whose reappearance throughout the Talmud plays an important role in working out tensions within the rabbinic legal project.