Michael Stanislawski's description of Flavius Josephus's autobiography captures the principal thesis of this elegant reflection on the use of autobiography as a historical source: “I see the Vita not as an ‘autobiography of a very special kind’ but precisely the opposite: as an exemplar of a genre (or series of connected genres) in which an author's life-story is crafted by a highly partial, both conscious and unconscious, selection of which episodes of his or her life to retell, refracted through an ever-changing sense of selfhood” (23). Not one of the seven samples ranks highly in terms of historical accuracy or absence of bias. But as the subtitle conveys, the real value of these autobiographies lies in their ability to reflect the self-fashioning of a literary identity, the tensions of the times (in Josephus's case, the loyal Jew and the virtuous Roman), and the individual's quest for definition in relation to the larger society.

Ronald Hendel's Remembering Abraham is a synthetic work that draws on diverse methodological approaches to tease out the interplay of past and present in the Bible's depiction of history. The plasticity of collective memory—the idea that a community's memory of the past changes as that community changes—is a key idea for this book, part of which is a study of the Bible's portrait of Abraham as a reflection of Israel's evolving identity. Hendel is no minimalist, however. For him, biblical history is not simply an invented memory without connection to what really happened, but a pastiche of memory and myth—a reflection of genuine historical experience framed within fictionalized representation. Remembering Abraham is something of a pastiche itself—several of its chapters reproduce previously published work—but the juxtaposition of these studies has value in its own right, offering students and general readers an accessible introduction to how a clear-headed and well-informed scholar distinguishes history from myth in the Bible—and why, in the end, the Bible resists such a distinction.

This volume takes a very different approach to biblical narrative, law, and society. In many ways, it is a treatise on comparative mythology, on comparative legal practice and attitudes. The author, Daniel Friedmann, is very forthcoming, saying that he does not intend “to tackle the immensity of scholarly literature in the field.” Instead, his intent is to “infer from the biblical stories the legal and moral concepts they reflect and the system of laws underlying them, which seems not to conform with many of the laws of the Pentateuch” (vii). There are only a few references to modern scholarship (all in footnotes—no bibliography of works cited); most of Friedmann's discussion is bolstered by references to Rashi, Maimonides, the Talmud, and other rabbinical commentaries. There is no attempt to interact with modern critical approaches to biblical interpretation, and there is no regard for current discussions of “maximalist” or “minimalist” dating and editing of the text.

Although it is a truism that there are fundamental methodological differences between the Ishmaelean and Aqiban schools of halakhic midrash, scholars have struggled to find a larger framework that explains the reasons for these divergences. Azzan Yadin has rendered an important service by proposing an overarching theory of hermeneutics that encompasses and informs the Ishmaelean approach to legal midrash. What follows is a brief summary and assessment of Yadin's line of argument.

In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Behind this exercise in local history, however, lies a broader intention: to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply “a gloom-filled parenthesis” for Morvedre's Jews but instead “an era of remarkable resurgence” (3)—nay, “a Jewish Renaissance,” as the book's title provocatively proclaims—Meyerson challenges the regnant vision of Spain's Jewish communities as sliding almost inexorably toward expulsion after 1391. In making his case, he weds an awareness of the historical aerial view with a fluency in older and more recent historiographic trends and an extraordinary mastery of events on the ground. The result is a copiously documented, lucidly written exploration of a treasure trove of hitherto mostly unknown archival sources that dazzles with its wealth of detail and enlivens through regular recourse to vivid vignettes.

The biography of a well-chosen rabbinic figure tells much more than simply the life of an individual; it opens up diverse facets of Jewish life in a given time and place. It also sheds light on the histories of a number of communities because, alas, it was (and is) the lot of many a communal rabbi—even those of the first rank—to be kicked around from place to place.

The intense response to Götz Aly's recently published book, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, attests to the continued interest in studies related to Germany's “Jewish Question” and the forces that motivated German citizens to support National Socialism. The scholarship produced decades ago by Paul Massing, Peter Pulzer, Fritz Stern, and George Mosse and reenergized by Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen in the 1990s has produced a rich and detailed analysis of the role that Jews occupied within the German national community. Not surprisingly, the origins and manifestations of anti-Semitism occupy center stage within this body of work, and less antagonistic relations between Jews and Gentiles in Germany receive scant attention. Studies that depict Gentile supporters of Jews and Judaism are virtually nonexistent. Alan Levenson's monograph, Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism, compels us to reconsider the continuum of attitudes toward Jews that existed in Germany from the establishment of the Kaiserreich to the advent of Nazism. The book's eight essays, all of which have been previously published, probe the limits of philosemitism within an anti-Semitic environment and flesh out the opposite end of the societal spectrum from those occupied by German anti-Semitism (xi).

A growing literature on the emergence of a Hebrew national culture in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine has opened up new understandings of the construction of Jewish nationhood in the modern world and its place in the broader context of modern nationalism. Yaacov Shavit and Shoshana Sitton conceive their study of the Yishuv's festive culture primarily as a contribution to this literature, in which they point to two principal lacunae. First, they argue that much of the scholarship to date has overlooked or oversimplified what were in fact “complex links between the ceremonial tradition and the [new national] festivals” (xii). Indeed, the revolutionary self-image that was central to so much of Zionist thought has often excessively colored the historiographical picture, and scholars have at times too hastily accepted the notion that Zionist culture in Palestine was an unambiguously radical new departure, fundamentally at variance with traditional Jewish ways of life. In fact, revolutionary though it was, Zionist culture in Palestine grew out of an often intense (if ambivalent) dialogue with the Jewish past. Not infrequently, it is the very attempts by (some) Zionist cultural activists to shake free of that tradition's impact that most clearly reveal its lingering shadow.

Over the past decade, we have seen a substantial number of books written on the entirely unlikely reemergence of Jewish life in both German states and the relationship of the Jewish communities to their German environment. Among the major contributions are those by Michael Brenner, Erica Burgauer (not Burgbauer, as in this book), Ulrike Offenberg, Micha Brumlik, Jael Geis, Jeffrey Herf, Juliane Wetzel and Angelika Königseder, Frank Stern, this reviewer, as well as a handful of others. Jay Geller's study, therefore, could not explore new terrain, but it does present us with a wide overview of the early period and a material-rich, diligently researched presentation of the postwar period. As such, it is clearly a new basic reference work for this early period of German–Jewish life.

Tamar El-Or has given us a book that could benefit from the layout of the Talmudic pages that provide the text for the women's studies she has researched. Using her observations as base, she develops multiple perspectives that go well beyond the usual anthropological ethnography, adding layer upon layer of interpretation and perspective. The book begins with a survey and description of the institutes of religious higher learning for women in Israel at the time of her data collection (late 1990s); continues with the presentation and analysis of her interviews with 40 (out of 1,300) female students at Bar-Ilan University's Midrasha (women's institute of religious higher learning) about their development as religious “learners”; presents the results of her three years of participant observation in classrooms at the Midrasha; and concludes with an interpretation of the data from the perspective of “literacy,” which is seen in the anthropological literature as a central facet of societal participation, and its implied meanings for gender relations among Jews (at least among the Orthodox).