Gershom Scholem points out that within Judaism the concept of redemption does not merely consist of an abstract feeling but entails a belief in a concrete physical redemption, publicly visible in this world and taking place on the stage of history and within the community. However, it projects the realization of this hope to the future, therefore making Jewish life provisional, incomplete, and unfulfilled—a “life lived in deferment.” The history of the Passover seder illustrates how both aspects of this outlook became expressed in a specific time and place. But it also indicates that the hope was not always projected into the future, for we find people who both believed in a physical redemption and at the same time tried to internalize redemption in their own lives.

According to rabbinic law, from the second century to the present, the offspring of a gentile mother and a Jewish father is a gentile, while the offspring of a Jewish mother and a gentile father is a Jew (albeit, according to the Mishnah, a mamzer, a Jew of impaired status). Each of these two rulings has its own history, as I shall show below, but it is convenient to group them together under the general heading of the “matrilineal principle.” Anthropologists and sociologists use the term matrilineal to describe societies in which kinship is determined through the females and not the males. Such societies once existed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and can still be found in parts of Africa, India, and Polynesia. Although rabbinic society and family law have not yet been studied in the light of modern anthropological and sociological theories, it seems clear that the kinship patterns which characterize matrilineal societies are thoroughly foreign to rabbinic society. With only a few exceptions, rabbinic family law is patrilineal. Status, kinship, and succession are determined through the father. (“The family of the father is considered family, the family of the mother is not considered family,” B. Bava Batra 109b.) Why, then, did the rabbis adopt a matrilineal principle for the determination of the status of the offspring of mixed marriages?

For close to fifty years, Cyrus Adler was one of American Jewry's most influential communal leaders and public servants. Taking part in the founding of the Jewish Publication Society (1888), on whose various committees he would serve as chairman throughout his life, Adler was a founder of the American Jewish Historical Society (1892), and its president for more than twenty years. Together with Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, Felix Warburg, and his cousin, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Adler played an instrumental role in organizing the American Jewish Committee (1906), and served as its president from 1929 until his death in 1940. During his thirtytwo years (1908–1940) as president and chief administrative officer of the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Adler shaped the institution into one of the preeminent institutions of higher Jewish learning in America. When Solomon Schechter died in 1915, Adler succeeded him to the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary, with which he had been closely associated since its founding in 1886, while remaining president of Dropsie as well. Serving as president of the seminary for twenty-five years, Adler played a central role in the founding of the United Synagogue, whose presidency he also held.

The main goal of this paper is to determine and describe the poetics of composition of the Hebrew short story in the Enlightenment (Haskalah) period. (The Haskalah was a major literary movement in Hebrew literature, mainly in Germany, Austria, and Russia, from 1780 to 1870. This movement evolved in three distinct phases: neoclassic, romantic, and realistic.) The narrative of the Haskalah period has received considerable attention from many critics and researchers, beginning with the first critics of Hebrew literature (such as Kovner, Brainin, Paperna, and Lilienblum), through critics of the early twentieth century (such as Feitelson, Robinson, Zitron, Zinberg, Frischmann, Slouschz, Shapira, Klausner, and Lachower), up to contemporary critics (Patterson, Weinfeld, Wersses, Shaked, Miron, Feingold, and others).