The Mishnah is preserved in a web of exegetical texts—the Tosefta, the alakhic midrashim, and the Talmuds—which have accompanied it iroughout its history of transmission. A common problem in mishnaic:xtual criticism, therefore, is to clarify the extent to which elements of the Mishnah's exegetical tradition have become part of the the text itself. It is for this reason that a question most appropriate to other literary texts is so difficult to answer for the Mishnah: at what point does the history of the text's creation end and the history of its transmission and interpretation begin? In a certain respect, of course, in the mishnaic case this question is conceptually flawed. By posing an absolute distinction between the redactionand transmission-history of the Mishnah, one reifies processes which, in fact, are most difficult to distinguish. Epstein in particular has shown that the text of the Mishnah, in the recension of Rabbi (Judah the Patriarch), remained relatively fluid for some centuries after its promulgation, ca. 200 C.E. Thus, the mishnaic text-types now available are in a very real sense no less the creations of the Mishnah's later students (the amoraim, or “explainers”) than they are the work of the Mishnah's authors.

Saadiah Gaon (882–942) was a prolific and pioneering teacher, sage, and communal leader who pursued his wide-ranging studies with a singleminded commitment. His was the first Rabbanite translation of the Hebrew Bible into Arabic; his was one of the first Hebrew dictionaries; his Siddur marked one of the first attempts to regularize the liturgy. His Kitāb al-Amānāt wa l-I'tiqādā (Book of Beliefs and Opinions) was the first major work of medieval Jewish philosophy. Written during his renowned forced retirement in the year 932 C.E., the Kitāb al-Amānāt represents the beginning of a long and noble tradition of Judeo-Arabic philosophy.

Although there has been much in modern scholarship written about the historical and theosophical background of the Zohar, scholars have paid little attention to the literary structure of the work and its relationship to the thematic content contained therein. There is, as far as I know, not one in-depth study of such a nature.

The problem of the redaction of the Talmud, the final stages of the process by which the document before us assumed its present shape, is one which every student of the Talmud must eventually face. Resolution of this problem is by no means a matter of mere historical curiosity. Knowledge of who the redactors were, at what time period (or time periods) they lived, and how they reworked their sources, is indispensable for full comprehension both of these component sources and of the final product into which they have been combined.

Both the Bible and the earliest Greek philosophers begin with accounts of the world's genesis. It is thus not surprising that medieval cosmological thought was preoccupied, perhaps obsessed, with the issue of creation. But what about the end of the world? If the universe had a beginning, does it necessarily have an end? Does creation imply destruction? On this topic the Bible is not so explicit and unambiguous. Greek philosophy, however, was virtually unanimous in claiming that whatever has a beginning will have an end, and that whatever will have an end had a beginning. If this cosmological principle is construed strictly, then the world's past and its future are essentially and necessarily linked together, such that the finitude of one entails the finitude of the other. This would mean that if the temporal history of the world is finite a pane ante, then by virtue of this cosmological principle it will have a temporal end a pane post. The most vigorous and detailed defense of the strict interpretation of this general principle was given by Aristotle, who attempted to prove it in his treatise On the Heavens. Henceforth, I shall refer to this principle as “Aristotle's theorem.”

Medieval Spain represents a unique phenomenon in the history of Jewish civilization. Not only did the Jews live longer in Spain than in any other land in their history (indeed, almost as long as they occupied their homeland in the land of Israel from Abraham to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.), but the Jewish population of medieval Spain was greater than that of all other lands combined, and the rich achievements of Jewish culture there were unequaled elsewhere. Of all the cities in Spain which served as major centers of Jewish life and culture, Toledo perhaps stands out as the most important. Studies dealing with Jewish life in Spain have recognized this, and the long-awaited appearance of a recent two-volume work in Spanish devoted to the Jews of Toledo has helped focus attention once again on the vast archival material available.

If Yehuda Amichai does not use as topics for his work all three of those that Dante considered fundamental to poetry, salus, venus, and virtus, the second, venus, appears as a pervasive theme, perhaps the most pervasive throughout his work, revealing a consistency of idea which has unfailingly moved through the structured verse of the early volumes to the less tersely conceived poems of later years. One of the primary topics of his poetry is the alteration of love within a variety of contexts: time, war, youth and maturity, memory and religion. Love is the framework in which most of the events of the poetry take place, and it is itself celebrated or mourned in a number of long lyric cycles, particularly in the early books, written between 1948 and 1968.

Amongst the most important roles which Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the preeminent kabbalist of sixteenth-century Safed, played in the lives of his disciples was that of physician of the soul. Before they could practice rituals which were intended to enable them to bind their souls to the divine realm, and to “repair” that realm in accordance with the teachings of Lurianic mythology, his disciples had first to mend their own souls, to cleanse and purify them of all imperfection No individual whose own soul had failed to achieve a certain level of perfection could hope to engage successfully in the intricate and elaborate contemplative rituals-such as the Yiḥudim-which Luria devised. A person had to undergo a period during which he cultivated certain spiritual and moral traits and atoned for whatever sins he might have committed. Luria, in fact, provided his followers with highly detailed rituals of atonement by which they were to mend their souls. These penitential acts were known as tikkunei avonot (“amends of sin”) whose purpose, in the words of Hayyim Vital's son Shmuel, was to “mend his soul"”and “cleanse him from the filth of the disease of his sins.” Hayyim Vital (1542–1620), Luria's chief disciple, himself introduces the tikkunei avonot with a discussion of the relationship between one's soul and sin.