Sepphoris and Tiberias were the most important administrative and rabbinic centers of Roman Galilee. The two cities had much in common: both were associated with Herod Antipas, who rebuilt Sepphoris sometime after a futile revolt in 4 B.C.E. and still later founded Tiberias; both had jurisdiction over the bank and archives of Galilee at various times during the first century; both had pro-Roman factions in the First Revolt, though that of Sepphoris was more influential; both maintained Hellenistic institutions and minted coins; both were connected by the major road built by Hadrian from Acco to the Sea of Galilee;5 both would eventually become home to the Sanhedrin and the patriarchal house; both maintained communities ofpriests associated with a particular mishmar (priestly course), and finally, both attracted many prominent tannaim and amoraim who establishednoted academies.

Dying in the state′s behalf, and at its request, is a matter that one might expect to be of obvious concern to the Jews throughout their history. Twice in bygone eras (roughly, 1000–586 B.C.E. and 140–63 B.C.E.) they have been ensconced in their own sovereign land faced with preserving that sovereignty against hostile neighbors and ambitious empires. Elsewhere, in the diaspora, they have been forced to define their relations and responsibilities to the host powers under whose authority they have variously been classed as aliens, residents, and citizens. And now, again, they are reestablished in their own sovereign state of Israel, in whose short history the call to arms has been unfortunately all too frequent. Yet the obligation to die for the state is not a question which enjoys especial treatment or ready resolution in Jewish sources.In part, this is because the Jewish tradition is not in nature a philosophical tradition, given to abstract systematic treatises in the manner of the ancient Greeks, to whom Western thought has ever since been indebted. It is, rather, a legal tradition, given over to the interpretation and application of legal minutiae in keeping with divine edict. Still, it would be wrong to conclude that Judaism and the Jewish tradition lack a coherent position on there being (or not being) an obligation to die for the state. Such, anyway, is what I wish to argue in this essay.

If law is conceived of, as religious law must be, as a revelation of the divine will, then any attempt to align that will with human wants, any attempt to have reality control rather than to be itself controlled by the divine norm, is an act of blasphemy and is inconceivable to a God-fearing man. As the Middle Ages was an age of faith among Jews no less than among Christians and Muslims, the unalignability, the “nonadaptability”if you wish, of religious law is a premise which must underlie all our investigations and understanding of the history of Halakhah in the Middle Ages. Yet the contention of this paper is that at times the very intensity of religious conviction and observance can be conducive to a radical transformation of religious law, and that the very depth of religious attachment can play a supportive role in deflecting the divine norm from the path of its immanent development, and bring it into line with the needs and practices of the time.

Julius Guttmann, in his classic work on the history of Jewish philosophy, summarizes his understanding of Maimonides' theory of divine providence:

Divine providence does not, therefore, mean interference with the external course of nature, but is transferred to the inner life of man, where it is founded on the natural connection between the human and the divine spirit.… Intellectual and not ethical factors are decisive for the role of divine providence.

What does it mean to study women's religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women's religious life and practice to the history of particular religious traditions? I shall explore these questions within the context of a very specific topic: the religious life of Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) Jewish women in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, as seen through the popular religious literature of the period. This literature, which was addressed primarily to women, was in Yiddish, the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews, rather than in Hebrew, the sacred language, understood almost exclusively by men. My thinking about the different approaches one could take to this material, and the different uses to which it could be put, was stimulated by a lecture given by Joan Scott on the study of women's history. Using a framework of analysis suggested in part by Scott's work, I will distinguish between three general approaches to the study of women's religion: (1) those that add an account of women's religious lives to an already existing history of Judaism; (2) those that consider women's Judaism within the framework of other groups usually omitted from the history of Judaism; and (3) those that seek to transform our understanding of Judaism through the incorporation of the perspective gained from the study of women's religion.

Ghettoization stimulated sixteenth-century Italian Jewry to develop larger and more complex political structures, because the Jewish community now became responsible for municipal tasks. This development, however, raised theological objections in Catholic circles because Christian doctrine traditionally forbade the Jewish people dominion. It also aroused hostility among the increasingly centralized governments of early modern Europe, who viewed Jewish self-government as an infringement of the sovereignty of the state. The earliest appearance of the term “state within a state,” which has become a shorthand expression for the latter view, was recently located in Venice in 1631.

The name of Rabbi Barukh Schick of Shklov (1744–1808) does not figure in the pantheon of great eighteenth-century Jewish personalities, alongside those of R. Israel Ba′al Shem Tov, Moses Mendelssohn, and R. Elijah, the Vilna Gaon. Unlike the latter, his teachings were not distinguished by great originality or profundity, and they exerted rather limited influence. Indeed, Schick's name might well have fallen into total oblivion were it not for a few lines in the introduction to one of his books (a Hebrew translation of Euclid's Elements), in which he related certain remarks made to him by the Vilna Gaon in support of the study of science.

When in 1981 the Israeli Cameri Theater performed The Passion of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin, the leading avant-garde playwrightin Israel (viewed by some as “the bad boy of the modern Israeli stage”),1 public outrage reached unprecedented heights.The scandal was partially provoked by Levin′s staging.His taste for the carnal and the cruel was much too unpalatable for many stomachs to digest.“People actually walked out, while others covered their eyes,” reported a review in the Jerusalem Post.2 No less detrimental, however, was the specific angle from which Levin th? playwright elected to retell the biblical story.For although the Hebrew title of the play, Yisurei Iyov, may be literally rendered as “Job′s Afflictions,” our translation was advisedly chosen: In his version, Levin catapults Job from the fictional land of Uz to Palestine of the Roman era, thereby embedding Job′s ordeal in that later agon between man and God–the passion of Christ.Accordingly, this dramatized Job does not live to hear an answer from the whirlwind, nor does he see his life redeemed.With a dramatic sleight of hand he is, paradoxically enough, the only character in the play who refuses to deny the existence of God–thus condemning himself to the stake.

The desire of the Franco-Jewish elite to foster the acculturation of French Jewry during the nineteenth century is a theme that has been explored in considerable detail in recent years. Historians of French Jewry have described the development of an ideology that identified Judaism primarily as a religion, have analyzed the attempts of various communal institutions to mitigate Jewish distinctiveness, and have demonstrated that the leaders of French Jewry adopted a policy of social integration both because they were attracted to the mainstream culture of France and because they felt that acculturation was the implied price of empancipation.