Understanding the authority of “the rabbis,” the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud who lived during the first five centuries of the common era, has always been a tricky business. The sages grounded their authority on the concept of the dual Torah—the belief that God revealed to Moses, in addition to the written Torah, an oral Torah, which was passed down in an unbroken chain from generation to generation. However, the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness during the Enlightenment rendered this view difficult to maintain. The rise of critical biblical studies revealed a gap between the religion of the Bible and Rabbinic Judaism. On what basis, then, are the pronouncements of the talmudic sages authoritative for subsequent generations of Jews?

Hirshman's cautious study promises a focus upon “a universalistic stream in the Tannaitic literature and its relationship to the wisdom of the nations.” The “universalism” he hopes to identify is a modest one: the notion that the Torah of Israel is intended ab origine to be a possession of all human communities (with some pointed exceptions, such as the Amalekites).

In this book, which is a slightly revised version of his dissertation, Aryeh Cohen tackles the challenge of reading the Babylonian Talmud as “literature.” This is a complex task, because the basis for a literary reading is not readily apparent. Large portions of the Bavli consist of logically dense legal argumentation. Cohen is to be commended for making these dense passages that comprise the overwhelmingly larger part of the Bavli the central topic of his analysis, for they give the Bavli its most distinctive literary qualities. Other approaches focus on subunits of rabbinic literature that are overtly literary, like parables or sage stories (ma‘asim). While these approaches stress the literary qualities of rabbinic literature, as Cohen notes, they treat the subunits in isolation and consequently ignore the meaning conferred upon them by their broader contexts.

Of the various genres of classical aggadic literature, the Talmudic “sage stories” are perhaps the most open to literary interpretation using contemporary methods. Other aggadic forms lack parallels in the conventional Western literary canon. Sage stories, in contrast, are short narratives that have much in common with those found in other, more well-studied, literary traditions. The tools of narrative analysis that have been developed by scholars of other literatures can thus be fruitfully applied to these rabbinic sage stories. It is therefore somewhat surprising that despite the proliferation of literary studies on midrash and aggada appearing in English in recent years, the analysis of sage stories has remained a relatively neglected field of inquiry among Anglophone scholars. This field has been dominated by Israeli scholars such as Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir, whose work has appeared largely in Hebrew. Jeffrey Rubenstein's Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture and the recent translation of Shulamit Valler's Nashim ve-Nashiut be-sipure ha-Talmud (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993) under the title Women and Womanhood in the Talmud are thus welcome and important additions to the world of English-language rabbinics scholarship.

Josef Stern's book “focuses on two elements in the Maimonidean revolution in the study of ta‘amei ha-miṣvot and their impact on Naḥmanides. The first is Maimonides' idea of the problematic commandment. The second is his idea that explanations of commandments—both individual laws and the . . . totality of commandments as a whole . . . should be modelled after the multileveled interpretation of parables” (p. 3). In Chapters Two, Three, and Six, Stern discusses Maimonides' well-known “historically sensitive, context-dependent . . . explanations for the legislation of the ḥuqqim” (p. 4). While Stern briefly touches upon a number of problems that Maimonides grapples with in light of these explanations, he focuses on “specific arguments the Guide contains to counter the antinomianism implicit in its explanation of the ḥuqqim” (p. 5). Stern's arguments and readings in these chapters are thoughtful and suggestive, if at times open to question, but space constraints prevent an analysis.hey also prevent my paying more than the barest attention to Stern's remarks about Naḥmanides. Rather, I will concentrate on the second focus of Stern's work, contained in Chapters One, Two, and Five; namely, his understanding of “Maimonides' theory of multileveled parabolic interpretation” (p. 68) and his claim that Maimonides extends this “parabolic model to the explanation of the commandments” (p. 11).

Jewish Law (Mishpat Ivri): Cases and Materials is a comprehensive and lucid analysis of Jewish law as it is used in the Israeli Supreme Court as part of Israeli secular law, exhaustively detailed and clearly written. It is designed to be used as an American law school textbook and is published by a law school publishing house—Matthew Bender—as part of its casebook series. The book begins with two questions: “How is it possible that a legal system bereft of territory and police power has not only persevered but flourished? Whence do the Jewish legal authorities derive their tradition-embedded answers to what appear to be novel, contemporary questions?” The book seeks to answer these queries with an exposition on the nature and purpose of Jewish law, followed by a chapter-by-chapter integration of the uses of Jewish law into Israeli secular law.

Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity traces the development of Jeremy Cohen's scholarship over almost two decades. Without abandoning the thesis he espoused in The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), that is, that a paradigm shift occurred among thirteenth- century Christian mendicant theologians with respect to the role of the Jew in the divine economy, here Cohen attempts to respond to his critics with a more nuanced treatment. Living Letters of the Law examines adaptations to the “hermeneutical Jew”—the putative, ahistorical Jew created by Augustinian theology—as the cultural horizons of the medieval Latin world broadened. Cohen traces the contours of the “hermeneutical Jew” from Augustine through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Agobard of Lyons before he turns to the twelfth century. Because he now finds more persuasive Amos Funkenstein's contention that twelfth-century anti-Jewish polemics signal an important shift in medieval perceptions of Judaism, here Cohen pays much more attention to twelfth-century authors (e.g. Anselm of Canterbury, Gilbert Crispin, Odo of Cambrai, Guibert of Nogent, Peter Alfonsi, Peter the Venerable, and Bernard of Clairvaux) than he had done in The Friars and the Jews, and considerably less to thirteenth-century mendicants. Indeed, Cohen explains that “reactions to my thesis on the significance of the friars [in The Friars and the Jews] . . . quickly convinced me that a fair assessment of later medieval Christian ideas of the Jew demanded a more conscientious investigation of their antecedents. The present study constitutes my attempt to move backward . . . ” (p. 314).

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of studies devoted to medieval Hebrew science, but few editions and explications of texts. In this book, Ruth Glasner provides a critical edition and exhaustive analysis of two polemical letters pertaining to physics by the fourteenth-century Provençal poet and philosopher Jedaiah ha-Penini (Bedersi) (born ca. 1285). These letters were largely forgotten until S. Pines drew attention to their significance and called for their publication over thirty years ago. That call has been answered in exemplary fashion in the present volume.

Ever since the appearance of the fifth and final volume (to be supplemented by Paula Sanders' excellent and indispensable cumulative index volume in 1993) of Goitein's magisterial reconstruction of Jewish social and economic life in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean world, there has been a general recognition of the need for an abridgement that would make the work more immediately accessible to the educated lay reader and could be a useful text for college students of Jewish, Islamic or even general medieval history. After all, such useful epitomes have been made—and remain popular—for such voluminous masterpieces as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Toynbee's A Study of History, or Frazer's The Golden Bough. Jacob Lassner's skillful one-volume edited abridgement has in part filled the need that was so sorely felt. I say “in part,” because the editor explains in his engaging Foreword (pp. xi–xxii) that it was in his view insufficient merely to delete major segments of the original (as any such abridgement would require), nor was it enough to rearrange the order of the segments that he had selected (a perhaps debatable, but certainly justifiable editorial decision which this reviewer finds quite successful), but rather it was “deemed necessary” to go beyond pruning Goitein's style and occasionally “to rewrite entire passages for the sake of clarity.” This latter editorial decision is somewhat unsettling since an author's voice, even when idiosyncratic or even flawed, is still his own. There is a slight echo of fertaytsht un ferbesert in such a tack.

Late-antique Israel enjoyed astonishing literary creativity and output in the form of the piyyut, which offered a poetic alternative to the standard liturgical language. The treasures from the Genizah have enriched our knowledge of the paytanim of this period, and important collections of the works of Yosi ben Yosi, Yannai, Shimon bar Megas, and Kallir have been compiled in recent years. But alongside these well-known paytanim were others, often anonymous but sometimes not, thanks to the use of name acrostics, a characteristic style of the piyyut. Numerous compositions identify a paytan whose name was Yehudah, and now his oeuvre has been ably compiled by van Bekkum.

Ruth Langer's meticulously researched volume fills a gap in the study of Jewish liturgy. While many histories of the liturgy focus on the origins, use of language, and literary aspects of the texts, Langer's study provides an analysis of some of the dynamics that shaped the halakhot dealing with prayer, thus impacting directly upon the spiritual life of Jews. How did the legal system that discussed issues regarding the liturgy develop? What questions were asked, and around which factors did disputes come about? What concepts and practices contributed to the resolution of differences? As Langer notes in her preface, a significant force in the formation of rabbinic prayer and the legal system undergirding it was the principle of worship as an evolving phenomenon. Once prayer is understood as both a communal and an individual response to God's covenant with Israel, the intricacies of the liturgical system must be developed and justified. They must express the history of the community as well as the existential needs of the person of faith.

The intensification of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel in the wake of expulsions and messianic stirrings brought together outstanding figures whose individual and collective achievements left an enduring imprint on Jewish life. The renaissance in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, particularly in Safed, produced one of the most remarkable and creative moments in Jewish intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Refugees from Spain and Portugal, as well as from Italian and German lands, wended their exile-weary way to the Holy Land. Fueled by a new, more favorable Ottoman administration and unprecedented economic opportunities, the conditions were set for the renewal of Jewish cultural life. Abraham David's book To Come to the Land is not primarily about the processes of immigration to the land, although a brief chapter is devoted to that subject at the beginning. It focusses on specific aspects of Jewish life in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, primarily in Jerusalem and Safed.

For more than a decade, Chava Weissler has called on readers to listen to the voices of matriarchs. Her numerous articles on tkhines—Yiddish prayers for private devotion typically recited by women of early modernity—have appeared in a wide variety of academic and, to a much lesser extent, popular publications. At once folklorist, ethnographer, literary critic, and student of classical Jewish texts and mysticism, Weissler has time and again applied her training in elite fields of learning to non-elite sources. While initially interested in merely “recover[ing] women's religious experience and contrast[ing] it to men's,” her objectives have broadened over the years to include “understanding the tkhines within the matrix of Ashkenazic Judaism” (pp. xii–xiii). Most recently, Weissler has turned to interpreting how tkhines influenced twentieth-century Jewish religious life in communities as diverse as Conservative Jewry and feminist ritual groups.

The challenge of writing a book on Kabbalah for the educated reader is to communicate the range of Kabbalistic experience, belief, and teaching without obscuring the subject or diluting its meaning. This book accomplishes that task with thoroughness and lucidity. The author draws upon a rich array of sources and presents a thorough panorama of Kabbalistic teachings in a clear and readable style despite the fact that it is a translation from Hebrew.

Few critical terms in use over the past two decades have been so abused and hence rendered almost meaningless as “postmodern.” And yet the term can be used to advantage to describe a period, its critical suppositions, and its inherent dispositions. It does signify the blurring of categories and styles, the shifting of identities, the often self-conscious invasion of the objective by the subjective. When the author of a serious scholarly study of a complex, seminal religious figure—a major influence and icon in modern Jewish narrative art like Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810)—designates herself a postmodern and conducts her investigation as a postmodernist scholar, we cannot ignore this hermeneutic stance.

Stroumsa publishes the medieval Hebrew version of Ibn Shim‘on's Silencing Epistle Concerning the Resurrection of the Dead alongside the epistle in the original Judeo-Arabic, a fine modern Hebrew translation of the latter, and profuse annotations to both versions. Both text and translation are published for the first time. The translation is highly readable and the author's notes very instructive. The work is a major contribution to our understanding of the intellectual climate and fervor of the Near Eastern Jewish world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Interest in the tension between religion and science has become the focus of much recent scholarship not only in Christian but in Jewish circles as well. Perhaps nowhere is this attempt seen as clearly as in recent works dealing with cosmology. Many recent books have attempted to reconcile contemporary views of creation with accounts found in scripture: for example, Samuelson's Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation (Cambridge, 1994), Matt's God and the Big Bang (Vermont, 1996), Schroeder's Genesis and the Big Bang (New York, 1990), and analogous books from the non-Jewish perspective, such as Trefil's The Moment of Creation (New York, 1983), and Davies' The Mind of God (New York, 1991). What these books have in common is the desire to harmonize accounts of creation that result from two webs of belief: religious and scientific.

Fields such as Jewish cultural history and women's studies, where interest in nineteenth-century Berlin Jewish literary salon society continues to grow, converge at the emblematic example of Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Heidi Thomann Tewarson's new biography, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual, is the first to address the English reader since Hannah Arendt's recently reissued Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, originally published in 1957. As such, Tewarson has incorporated the most up-to-date research on this figure and period, otherwise available almost solely in German. Arendt's work has traditionally been read as part biography and part autobiography—as much about identification and coming to terms with Jewish identity as a German Jewish woman intellectual in 1930s Berlin as it is about the salon period. Tewarson has taken a different tack. Rather than focusing on the life of a Jewess per se, Tewarson is interested in the work of an intellectual. What constitutes the legitimate, creative work of an intellectual? And can the term itself be gender-free? These questions, though necessarily tied to Rahel's place outside the literary and cultural mainstream, serve as the main thrust of the book.

The forced conversions of perhaps a third of the Jews of Spain in 1391 presented significant dilemmas for the Spanish Crown, the Spanish Church, and the conversos themselves. While the Church insisted that baptism, even by force, was irrevocable, instructing and assimilating so many converts was a major challenge. Conversos, too, were in a quandary: Some chose to relocate and revert to Judaism openly; others accepted their altered situation and not a few pursued new possibilities in Church and public roles; many married their children into Old Christian families. There were New Christians, however, who relinquished neither birthplace nor heritage, choosing to observe Judaism surreptitiously. By the last decades of the fifteenth century, when an increasingly anxious Church encouraged a reluctant Crown to establish an Inquisition directed at conversos engaging in Jewish practices, women had become a particular target. As Renée Levine Melammed observes in her detailed and well-argued analyses of Inquisition proceedings against women accused of judaizing, “The Inquisitors realized the unusual importance of the home in crypto-Judaism and understood that women willingly became the carriers of the tradition they viewed as inimical” (p. 15). Melammed's delineations of the interactions between these women and their adversaries in the inquisitorial courts demonstrates the determination of some conversa women to subvert the teachings of the Church and risk prison or death to provide for the Jewish continuity of their families.

This is a superb study of post-Holocaust theology, perhaps the best study of its kind since Steven Katz's Post-Holocaust Dialogues. Zachary Braiterman focuses on three of the most important post-Holocaust theologians—Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackeheim—in an attempt to demonstrate that all three thinkers share a common discourse rooted in a theological sensibility which Braiterman identifies as “antitheodicy,” a term he has coined. Antitheodicy refers to a position which rejects theodicy—that is, any attempt to justify God in the face of catastrophic suffering or to see redeeming value in it, even if one continues to believe in God. Braiterman also makes use of postmodern insights to explore the dynamic of how the three post-Holocaust theologians reread or misread the traditional sources in order to catapult antitheodic discourse from the margins of Jewish thought into its center.