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.

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.

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.