Throughout the past two centuries, the corpus of rabbinic writings, called either tannaitic midrashim or halakhic midrashim, has served as a pivotal foundation upon which scholars have based their historical reconstructions of the development of rabbinic Judaism. The reasons for this dependence are manifold. Predated in redaction by only the Mishnah, these documents contain a wealth of traditions attributed to the founders of rabbinic Judaism who flourished during its nascency. Moreover, these texts differ significantly in rhetorical style, logic, scope, and concern not only from those rabbinic documents which precede them (Mishnah), follow them (Palestinian/Babylonian Talmuds and amoraic midrashim), or are, perhaps, contemporaneous with them (Tosefta), but also among themselves as a corpus of writings. Finally, these documents are the earliest collections of rabbinic biblical exegesis (“Midrash”) and, were it not for a small number of examples of exegesis preserved in the Mishnah and Tosefta, they would also represent the earliest examples of rabbinic biblical interpretation known today. For reasons such as these, the tannaitic midrashim have figured prominently in research conducted over the past century on the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism.

The Western perception of Islam as a belligerent religion owes many of its stereotypes not only to the Crusades, but also to the early modern rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe. Heated debates about the “Turkish menace” dominated European political discourse until the (second) Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, as documented by the innumerable Turcica that circulated both swiftly and widely thanks to revolutionary advances in printing. Sixteenth-century Christian authors provided their eager readers with constantly updated versions of Ottoman history, as did some of their Jewish contemporaries. Probably the first Jew to make the Ottomans the major subject matter of his work was Elijah Capsali of Candia in Venetian Crete, who in 1523 completed a Hebrew chronicle titled Seder ءEliyahu Zuta (“Minor Order of Elijah”).

In the early 1880s, the staunch Hebraist and bibliophile Ephraim Deinard (1846–1930) became a reluctant witness to the fast-paced growth of modern Yiddish culture that began in his hometown of Odessa. At the time, Deinard owned a Hebrew bookshop that had been sliding toward bankruptcy until he grudgingly adapted his wares to better reflect the market forces of the Jewish reading culture. In Memories of My People (Zikhronot bat עami), he briefly accounts for (in his view) the ill fortune of being forced to sell the Yiddish books that his customers demanded of him rather than the Hebrew literature he held so dear. Although he mentions a host of nineteenth-century Yiddish writers whom the reader will come to know in the following pages, for our present purpose, it is sufficient to remark upon the catalytic agency he assigns to the Yiddish romance novelist Nakhum Shaykevitsh (aka Shomer) (1849–1905) and Avraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), best known as the father of the Yiddish theatre. Deinard writes:

Jewish sources emanating from the Islamic world of the Middle Ages abound in references to individuals bearing the title nasiء (“prince”; plural, nesiءim). In the unique religious and cultural world of the medieval Near East this biblical designation signified, with rare exception, descent from King David through the line of the Babylonian exilarchs. While at one time the title was restricted to incumbents of the exilarchate, by the eleventh century CE it had been appropriated by a broader circle of individuals who claimed descent from David but were often only distantly related to occupants of that office. These nesiءim enjoyed a measure of status in the Jewish communities of the Near East that was informed by the importance of noble ancestry in Arabic society in general and Islamic veneration for King David in particular.

Among scholars of Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Yemen has gained a poor reputation for treatment of its ancient Jewish minority in comparison with other predominantly Muslim societies. Although Yemen had, until the 1950s, a sizable Jewish population whose presence dated back centuries before the advent of Islam, various Muslim rulers of key parts of Yemen enforced the sumptuary laws and other restrictions stipulated in the Pact of עUmar with unusual stringency, and the Jews' history under Islamic rule was marred by sporadic instances of outright persecution.

This paper explores the development of a particular talmudic halakhic theme—the restitution of lost property—through the philosophical prism of Hilary Putnam's distinction between concepts and conceptions. This distinction holds that one can affirm a set of concepts without commitment to the underlying conceptions from which they are drawn. The focus here is upon substantial discrepancies between tannaitic and amoraic authorities in the presentation of the halakhot of restitution of lost property. These discrepancies testify to a significant change in the underlying conceptual framework of tannaitic and amoraic halakhic thinking on this topic.

The two dictionaries under review represent the product of decades of assiduous research and persistent effort on the part of Professor Michael Sokoloff of Bar Ilan University. Previoiusly, he has contributed major works in the Aramaic field in collaboration with other scholars. There is, first of all, A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic (Gröningen: Styx Publications, 1997), a multivolume edition of texts prepared in collaboration with Christa Müller-Kessler. This was followed by a Hebrew work, [Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity] (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, 1999), prepared in collaboration with Joseph Yahalom. However, the dictionaries reviewed here, which represent his most ambitious projects, bear his name alone, with only technical and electronic assistance in their actual preparation provided on the part of others. Sokoloff has also published A Dictionary of Judean Aramaic (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2003), covering sources from 150 BCE to 200 CE, which includes the rich material preserved in the Aramaic papyri from the Judean Desert.

Despite the focus by the popular media on the revival of Jewish instrumental klezmer music during the past decades, surprisingly little of a scholarly nature has been written until recently about either the klezmer tradition or its revival. Since 1999 a relatively large number of new book publications of both a scholarly and a popular nature have appeared. Besides the four volumes under review here, they include books by Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin, Moshe Beregovski, Seth Rogovoy, Mark Slobin, Zinovij Stoljar, and Yale Strom. It is hoped that the publication of these four works (and the other recent works not reviewed here) will open a broader discussion of the complex of issues surrounding klezmer and ḥasidic music and stimulate further research in these areas.

This set of interrelated studies is full of closely reasoned analyses and bold but careful speculation. Several of these studies provide a model, almost unique within biblical studies, of how to integrate biblical and extra-biblical data within a framework deeply informed by theory. The book is intended for specialists with expertise in technical details the book addresses but rarely pauses to describe.

In this wide-ranging overview of biblical literature, Israel Knohl argues that the Hebrew Bible does not present a consistent or monolithic viewpoint concerning ancient Israel's or Judaism's understanding of God, itself, and the world in which it lived. Rather, Knohl contends that the Bible presents a pluralism of viewpoints that to a great degree anticipates the pluralistic outlook of Rabbinic Judaism. This will hardly come as a surprising thesis to anyone familiar with modern biblical and theological scholarship. Indeed, it takes up the classic question of unity and diversity within the Hebrew Bible that might be illustrated by Gerhard von Rad's well-known Old Testament Theology. Von Rad recognized the diversity of traditions that informed the various writings and viewpoints now gathered in the Bible while simultaneously trying to systematize them into a general concept of Heilsgeschichte, that is, “salvation history” or “sacred history.” Such Heilsgeschichte moved inexorably to what von Rad believed would be the ultimate culmination of human history. Knohl's contribution comes not in relation to the model of pluralism in the Bible per se, but in relation to his argument that so much of the priestly literature that engages in pluralistic debate with other biblical works is rooted in the monarchic period of ancient Israel's (or Judah's) history. In this respect, Knohl's own work—although original in its own right—owes much to an earlier model advocated by Yehezkel Kaufmann, one of the founding fathers of modern Israeli biblical scholarship.

Ithamar Gruenwald's recent book brings together various essays the author has published over the last few years, each seeking to rethink aspects of ritual theory, especially as applied to the rituals of ancient Israel. After introducing his themes and approach in the first chapter, Gruenwald addresses (in Chapter 2) what he calls the “economic ethos” of ancient Israel, speculating that “in the history of ancient Israel, the transition from ethos to religion is connected to the passage from nomadic lifestyle to an urban one” (p. 67). The third chapter reexamines the relationship between myth and ritual. The last three chapters are devoted to ritual theory as it pertains, respectively, to rabbinic halakhah (Chapter 4), biblical sacrifice (Chapter 5), and the “Lord's Supper,” as related primarily in the writings of Paul. Throughout the book, Gruenwald emerges as an emphatic spokesperson for the non-symbolic nature of rituals in general, and of biblical sacrifice in particular. While this book is wide-ranging in scope, a significant portion of chapters 2 and 6 are devoted to the stated theme of chapter 5: biblical sacrifice. Because Gruenwald himself believes that “sacrifices constitute the core of religion” (p. 189), perhaps the best way to review his complicated book briefly is to examine his approach to this particular ritual structure.

The central thesis of Lorberbaum's book is that according to the rabbis, the meaning of imago dei is that there is tangible divine presence within every human being. This concept impacted primarily upon two areas of halakhah: the death penalty and procreation. Since humans are physical representations of God, execution is equivalent in some ways to deicide. Conversely, procreation is strongly mandated because it increases God's physical manifestation in the world by creating more vehicles in which to embody God's presence. Importantly, as “images” of the divine, human beings function as icons in a manner similar to the way idols function in the pagan world; they draw God's presence into themselves, blurring the borders between representation and form. Finally, the drawing of God's presence into the human body dictates that human beings are embodied with significant theurgic powers.

Three texts are scrutinized in this monograph: Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive son of Awake), the Epistle or philosophic “Recital” composed in Arabic prose by the Muslim sage ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037); Hayy ben Meqitz, the closely related Hebrew poem composed by the Andalusian Jewish sage Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164); and Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the more loosely related Arabic treatise composed by the Andalusian Muslim sage Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (1116–1185). Each of the texts is well known to specialists in medieval intellectual history. Editions and critical discussions abound, almost all of them listed in the bibliography (pp. 245-65). The Arabic texts have long been accessible in reliable English translations. Thanks to Aaron W. Hughes, the same can now be said for ibn Ezra's less familiar narrative poem. In the appendix (pp. 189–207), the poem is rendered into English based on the original Hebrew text published in 1983 by Israel Levin. The translation is enhanced by references to the biblical idioms employed by ibn Ezra who ingeniously transformed ibn Sina's profoundly Islamic original into an equally stunning Hebrew gem.

Marc Shapiro puts an explicit contemporary context on this remarkable collection of sources that disagreed with one part or other of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles—the beliefs Maimonides asserted were absolutely necessary to be considered a believing Jew and to attain the World to Come. By showing the extent to which past authors disagreed with those Principles, Shapiro seeks to debunk assertions by contemporary writers that place those Principles at the core of Orthodox belief.

Pinchas Giller is one of the finest contemporary scholars of the zoharic corpus. His current study, Reading the Zohar, constitutes an excellent sequel to his earlier book, The Enlightened Will Shine. The Zohar certainly warrants the kind of thoughtful and serious reflection that Giller devotes to it, insofar as the Zohar is a massive, complex corpus consisting of some two dozen distinct strata. In Enlightened, Giller examined major themes in Tikkunei Zohar and Raעayaء Mehemnaء. Although these are rich and interesting compositions, chronologically they are among the latest and were undoubtedly written by someone other than whoever was responsible for the foundational writings of the Zohar. In Reading the Zohar, Giller is primarily concerned with three seminal aspects of the zoharic corpus: Sabaءde-mishpatim, cosmogonic descriptions that are preserved in various strata, and the four interconnected עIdrot texts. On its own, an analysis of such disparate and challenging sources would be an admirable undertaking. What makes Giller's study even more ambitious is that he also examines how these particular works were studied and interpreted. In particular, Giller is interested in how the kabbalists of Safed, most notably R. Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, incorporated these zoharic texts into their distinctive theosophical systems.

German Jewish communities underwent momentous changes in status, composition, and character during the fifteenth century, yet apart from its intellectual legacy, this period has merited scant attention from historians. Even contemporaries viewed the post-plague German communities as a diminished and spent shadow of their vital medieval Ashkenazic predecessors, and historiography has maintained this perception. Scholars characterized the period as one of intellectual decline, population shrinkage and expulsion from the remaining cities that had not destroyed or expelled their Jewish communities during the bubonic plague depredations. Despite the real devastation caused by the fourteenth-century chaos, much vibrant life remained within German Jewish communities. Little has been written, particularly in English, concerning the reasons for subsequent Christian resistance to the presence of Jews and the effects of new Christian conceptions of their own communities on Jewish self-perception. Bell's book intends to fill this gap. Neither a social history, nor an intellectual history of fifteenth-century Germans and Jews, it is a pioneering attempt to track the changing definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in the fifteenth century. It is an ambitious enterprise.

Jehiel Jacob Weinberg was, and remains, one of the outstanding figures of Modern Orthodoxy, along with David Zvi Hoffmann, Isaac Herzog, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Shapiro's exemplary biography marks the onset of a new stage in biographical scholarship about leading Orthodox personalities, moving beyond the hagiographies (which brought the figures to attention while affirming the Orthodox community) and the pioneer studies of Aharon Sorasky and Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff, and is a mandate for Judaic scholars to study the other greats (including the Hofets Hayim, Hayim Hirschensohn, Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Nathan Birnbaum, Hayim Ozer Grodzensky and Jakob Rosenheim). This book tells us what it takes to be a pathfinder in the world of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism: the courage to carry a Hegelian-like dialectic about religious options to conclusion in a world of societal turmoil and historical trauma. As Weinberg moved from Slobodka to Pilwishki (Lithuania), to Giessen, Berlin, and then through the Warsaw ghetto, detention camp in Wülzburg, and finally to Montreux, he existentialized the struggle between the isolated talmudic culture of Eastern Europe and the Talmud cum secular culture of the West and its synthetic conclusion.

This book searchingly reexamines and sheds much new light on subjects that might already seem to have received more than enough scholarly attention. Ronald Schechter succeeds in offering an intriguing new account of the attitude of the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, some of their heirs, and some of their enemies toward the Jews. He also presents a challenging, if less than fully convincing, interpretation of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French Jews' response to what was being said about them and what was happening to them.

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

The subtitle tells it all: the book is not about bioethics, business ethics or communal ethics, but about the kind of ethics one should establish for one's personal life. Starting with issues of privacy, the book moves us through sexual ethics, relationships within families, forgiveness, and finally, hope. Although traditional Jewish sources are mined for their insights, in the end, this is one person's notion about what Jewish ethics can (and should) say about issues of personal ethics. Dorff acknowledges this right in his preface, “throughout the book, I present what I take to be an authentic reading and application of the Jewish tradition but surely not the only one. I therefore take care to use judgment [emphasis in the original] in assessing how the tradition should be best applied to modern circumstance, by providing arguments from the tradition and from modern sources and circumstance to justify [emphasis in the original] my reading of the tradition and arguing against alternative readings” (p. xii). In short, the book is not descriptive of the Jewish tradition but prescriptive, laying out how one should think about these issues as a modern American Jew who wants to think “Jewishly.”