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.

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.

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.

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.