In a book published several years ago entitled Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism,1. Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. (Henceforth: Keter) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. I tried to make a modest contribution to the ongoing discussion of Kabbalistic symbols and their origins. There I traced the evolution of a single but key symbol from its place in rabbinic aggadah and early Jewish esotericism to its fixed role in the Kabbalistic symbol system of the High Middle Ages. Here I would like to repeat that process with regard to another major symbolic element of Kabbalah, considering broadly the role of the female within the godhead, particularly under the twin rubrics of shekhinah, the indwelling Presence, and kenesset yisra'el, the hypostatized “Community of Israel.” The positing of a female aspect within the divine self has to be seen against the background of the entire tradition of Jewish imaging of God, going back to the Bible and the early rabbis. Specifically, however, I plan to show that the unequivocal feminization of shekhinah in the Kabbalah of the thirteenth century is a Jewish response to and adaptation of the revival of devotion to Mary in the twelfth century Western church.

The Sephardic community of Hamburg was founded by Portuguese conversos who had settled in the Hamburg area during the three decades prior to 1611. In that year, after receiving permission to form a Jewish community in Hamburg, the conversos purchased from Christian IV, king of Denmark, a tract of land near the town of Altona for use as a cemetery. During most of the time period discussed in this article, Altona was under the crown of Denmark, while Hamburg was an independent Hanseatic city ruled by a senate of burghers. Today, Altona is a district of the city of Hamburg, within walking distance of the city's historic center.

It is astounding how much scholars find to say about the writings of Maimonides.1. Amazon.com lists 120 books with the name “Maimonides” in the title. (Yahoo.com lists 95. The Arizona State University Library, whose collection in Judaica, especially in Jewish philosophy, is in no way distinguished, possesses 107 books with the name “Maimonides” in the title.) That means that there a minimum of 120 books currently in print in the United States that deal with what Maimonides had to say. Similarly, the Philosopher's Index, whose subject matter is limited to scholarly essays in philosophy, dating back no further than 1940, lists 220 entries. The total list of written works on Maimonides, of course, is much larger. These 120 books and 220 articles are almost exclusively works written in English published in the final half of the twentieth century. This numerical breadth in itself suggests two things. First, it is not possible for any scholars to be sure that their coverage of the secondary material is complete. To remain current on all that is published about Maimonides is a full-time job, one that leaves little opportunity to actually write about him. Second, it is not conceivable for any Rambam scholars to think that what they publish is the “final word” on what Maimonides intended to say on any topic. If you want to take a critical stance you could say that what he wrote is too fuzzy for that, but I would say, more constructively, that Maimonides' writings are too rich in depth and complexity for us to ever exhaust what he wrote. That richness in itself is one of the reasons for studying and teaching Maimonides. It is a good indication why Maimonides' theology properly ranks among the greatest bodies of work in the history of philosophy.

In this monumental book, Paul Heger attempts to explain how synagogue recital of biblical texts replaced the sacrificial cult (p. 366). He posits that gradual disaffection with the Temple enabled the rabbis to institute synagogue ritual for sacrifice even while the second Temple stood. The work is wide-ranging, yet focused, and provides a detailed history of the cult from the Bronze Age until the destruction of the second Temple. The first half is a diachronic study of the three biblical altar laws. The second half investigates the impact of Ahaz, Josiah, Ezra and Nehemiah, the Maccabees, and finally the rabbis on attitudes toward temple sacrifice.

Biography is not a genre usually associated with the academic study of the Bible, but it has found a small niche therein. The University of South Carolina publishes the series called “Personalities of the Old Testament,” in which Steussy's volume is the eighth, and Oxford University Press will soon release what may be considered a companion to McKenzie's book, King Josiah of Judah by Marvin A. Sweeney. The advantage of biography is that it can encompass literary, historical, and archeological information, uniting them holistically around the focal point of a biblical figure, or as holistically as the author chooses. As a heuristic device, biblical biography may serve well even if the subject of the biography is fictional, or suspected of being so. (The “Personalities” series has volumes on Noah, Jonah, Esther and Daniel, hardly the most “historical” of characters.) When it comes to David, suspicions about his fictionality are at an all-time high. While the historicity of Abraham has been in doubt for some time, it was, until recently, axiomatic that one could speak with confidence about the early history of the Israelite monarchy and could draw on the books of Samuel and Kings as primary sources, or at least as containing remnants of primary sources for the period of the united monarchy. Now that confidence has been shaken; the very existence of a united monarchy is being questioned by some scholars, especially the “minimalists,” who see its “primary sources” (the Deuteronomistic History) as a fabrication from the Persian or Hellenistic period.1. See G. N. Knoppers, “The Vanishing Solomon: The Disappearance of the United Monarchy from Recent Histories of Ancient Israel,” Journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 19–44. For a representative of the minimalist view see K. W. Whitelam, “The History of Israel: Foundations of Israel” in Text in Context, edited by A. D. H. Mayes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 376–402. A battle currently rages among historians of ancient Israel between the minimalists and their opponents (not all of whom are “maximalists”) about the antiquity and the reliability of the Deuteronomistic History as a historical source.2. The names prominent among the minimalists are Philip Davies, Niels Lemche, Thomas Thompson, and Keith Whitelam. The bibliography on this debate is large and growing. For an overview see Amy Dockser Marcus, The View from Nebo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), 105–128, 256–257.

The JPS Torah/Bible Commentary series has already produced some exceptional commentaries that have immensely enriched biblical scholarship, and Uriel Simon's Jonah commentary is a worthy addition to this series. He concludes that the Book of Jonah was composed during the Second Temple period, mainly because of the late Hebrew language, but he does not find sufficient grounds to decide between a sixth-, fifth-, or even fourth-century date. Nor does Simon believe that the book offers evidence for reconstructing a particular social-political context that would help to define a special target audience. He concludes that, like the Book of Job, which was also composed in the Second Temple period and which also featured non-Jews among its cast of characters, the Book of Jonah was written during a period in which theodicy was a dominant concern within the Jewish community.

In this book (a translation of a revised version of the second Hebrew edition), the late Professor Benjamin Uffenheimer examines a variety of topics in the history of prophecy from the time of Moses until the time of Elisha. The book includes extensive discussions of all the prophetic figures in this period, focussing on the relation between preclassical prophecy on the one hand and magic, divination, and rationalistic or monotheistic trends on the other. Uffenheimer also devotes a lengthy chapter to alleged parallels to Israel prophecy among ancient Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Northwest Semites.

Eugene Ulrich is John A. O'Brien Professor of Hebrew Scriptures at the University of Notre Dame. Since his graduate student days at Harvard in the early 1970s, he has been studying and writing about the biblical text, that is, the text of the Hebrew Bible as transmitted and translated in antiquity. His primary claim to academic fame, and at one point public notoriety, is his ongoing leadership in editing and publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is Ulrich's interpretations of these scrolls in the context of the history and development of the biblical text that form the subject of the first eight of his essays collected here. These essays, especially the first six, are also bound to be the most interesting to nonspecialists. (The remainder of the book is taken up with fairly technical discussions of the Septuagint and the Old Latin.)

As Robert P. Gordon's foreword explains, Michael Perry Weitzman's Syriac Version of the Old Testament was originally projected as the first of two volumes on the subject. One can only concur with Gordon that Dr. Weitzman's recent death is a great loss to the academic community as well as to family and friends.

This volume explores two major questions: “What is that makes a Jew a Jew, and a non-Jew a non-Jew?” and “Can a gentile become a Jew?” (p. 2). The term “Jew” was ambiguous because “there was no single or simple definition of Jew in antiquity . . . ,” and there were no “empirical or ‘objective' criteria by which to determine who was ‘really' a Jew. . . . Jewishness was a subjective identity, constructed by the individual . . . other Jews, other gentiles, and the state” (p. 3). Cohen points to Herod to demonstrate that one could be called a Jew and an Idumean at the same time (p. 23).

Hirshman's cautious study promises a focus upon “a universalistic stream in the Tannaitic literature and its relationship to the wisdom of the nations.” The “universalism” he hopes to identify is a modest one: the notion that the Torah of Israel is intended ab origine to be a possession of all human communities (with some pointed exceptions, such as the Amalekites).

Of the various genres of classical aggadic literature, the Talmudic “sage stories” are perhaps the most open to literary interpretation using contemporary methods. Other aggadic forms lack parallels in the conventional Western literary canon. Sage stories, in contrast, are short narratives that have much in common with those found in other, more well-studied, literary traditions. The tools of narrative analysis that have been developed by scholars of other literatures can thus be fruitfully applied to these rabbinic sage stories. It is therefore somewhat surprising that despite the proliferation of literary studies on midrash and aggada appearing in English in recent years, the analysis of sage stories has remained a relatively neglected field of inquiry among Anglophone scholars. This field has been dominated by Israeli scholars such as Jonah Fraenkel and Ofra Meir, whose work has appeared largely in Hebrew. Jeffrey Rubenstein's Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition and Culture and the recent translation of Shulamit Valler's Nashim ve-Nashiut be-sipure ha-Talmud (Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1993) under the title Women and Womanhood in the Talmud are thus welcome and important additions to the world of English-language rabbinics scholarship.

Jewish Law (Mishpat Ivri): Cases and Materials is a comprehensive and lucid analysis of Jewish law as it is used in the Israeli Supreme Court as part of Israeli secular law, exhaustively detailed and clearly written. It is designed to be used as an American law school textbook and is published by a law school publishing house—Matthew Bender—as part of its casebook series. The book begins with two questions: “How is it possible that a legal system bereft of territory and police power has not only persevered but flourished? Whence do the Jewish legal authorities derive their tradition-embedded answers to what appear to be novel, contemporary questions?” The book seeks to answer these queries with an exposition on the nature and purpose of Jewish law, followed by a chapter-by-chapter integration of the uses of Jewish law into Israeli secular law.

Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity traces the development of Jeremy Cohen's scholarship over almost two decades. Without abandoning the thesis he espoused in The Friars and the Jews (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), that is, that a paradigm shift occurred among thirteenth- century Christian mendicant theologians with respect to the role of the Jew in the divine economy, here Cohen attempts to respond to his critics with a more nuanced treatment. Living Letters of the Law examines adaptations to the “hermeneutical Jew”—the putative, ahistorical Jew created by Augustinian theology—as the cultural horizons of the medieval Latin world broadened. Cohen traces the contours of the “hermeneutical Jew” from Augustine through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, and Agobard of Lyons before he turns to the twelfth century. Because he now finds more persuasive Amos Funkenstein's contention that twelfth-century anti-Jewish polemics signal an important shift in medieval perceptions of Judaism, here Cohen pays much more attention to twelfth-century authors (e.g. Anselm of Canterbury, Gilbert Crispin, Odo of Cambrai, Guibert of Nogent, Peter Alfonsi, Peter the Venerable, and Bernard of Clairvaux) than he had done in The Friars and the Jews, and considerably less to thirteenth-century mendicants. Indeed, Cohen explains that “reactions to my thesis on the significance of the friars [in The Friars and the Jews] . . . quickly convinced me that a fair assessment of later medieval Christian ideas of the Jew demanded a more conscientious investigation of their antecedents. The present study constitutes my attempt to move backward . . . ” (p. 314).

Ever since the appearance of the fifth and final volume (to be supplemented by Paula Sanders' excellent and indispensable cumulative index volume in 1993) of Goitein's magisterial reconstruction of Jewish social and economic life in the medieval Islamic Mediterranean world, there has been a general recognition of the need for an abridgement that would make the work more immediately accessible to the educated lay reader and could be a useful text for college students of Jewish, Islamic or even general medieval history. After all, such useful epitomes have been made—and remain popular—for such voluminous masterpieces as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Toynbee's A Study of History, or Frazer's The Golden Bough. Jacob Lassner's skillful one-volume edited abridgement has in part filled the need that was so sorely felt. I say “in part,” because the editor explains in his engaging Foreword (pp. xi–xxii) that it was in his view insufficient merely to delete major segments of the original (as any such abridgement would require), nor was it enough to rearrange the order of the segments that he had selected (a perhaps debatable, but certainly justifiable editorial decision which this reviewer finds quite successful), but rather it was “deemed necessary” to go beyond pruning Goitein's style and occasionally “to rewrite entire passages for the sake of clarity.” This latter editorial decision is somewhat unsettling since an author's voice, even when idiosyncratic or even flawed, is still his own. There is a slight echo of fertaytsht un ferbesert in such a tack.

The intensification of Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel in the wake of expulsions and messianic stirrings brought together outstanding figures whose individual and collective achievements left an enduring imprint on Jewish life. The renaissance in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, particularly in Safed, produced one of the most remarkable and creative moments in Jewish intellectual, religious, and cultural history. Refugees from Spain and Portugal, as well as from Italian and German lands, wended their exile-weary way to the Holy Land. Fueled by a new, more favorable Ottoman administration and unprecedented economic opportunities, the conditions were set for the renewal of Jewish cultural life. Abraham David's book To Come to the Land is not primarily about the processes of immigration to the land, although a brief chapter is devoted to that subject at the beginning. It focusses on specific aspects of Jewish life in sixteenth-century Eretz Israel, primarily in Jerusalem and Safed.

The challenge of writing a book on Kabbalah for the educated reader is to communicate the range of Kabbalistic experience, belief, and teaching without obscuring the subject or diluting its meaning. This book accomplishes that task with thoroughness and lucidity. The author draws upon a rich array of sources and presents a thorough panorama of Kabbalistic teachings in a clear and readable style despite the fact that it is a translation from Hebrew.

Stroumsa publishes the medieval Hebrew version of Ibn Shim‘on's Silencing Epistle Concerning the Resurrection of the Dead alongside the epistle in the original Judeo-Arabic, a fine modern Hebrew translation of the latter, and profuse annotations to both versions. Both text and translation are published for the first time. The translation is highly readable and the author's notes very instructive. The work is a major contribution to our understanding of the intellectual climate and fervor of the Near Eastern Jewish world of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Interest in the tension between religion and science has become the focus of much recent scholarship not only in Christian but in Jewish circles as well. Perhaps nowhere is this attempt seen as clearly as in recent works dealing with cosmology. Many recent books have attempted to reconcile contemporary views of creation with accounts found in scripture: for example, Samuelson's Judaism and the Doctrine of Creation (Cambridge, 1994), Matt's God and the Big Bang (Vermont, 1996), Schroeder's Genesis and the Big Bang (New York, 1990), and analogous books from the non-Jewish perspective, such as Trefil's The Moment of Creation (New York, 1983), and Davies' The Mind of God (New York, 1991). What these books have in common is the desire to harmonize accounts of creation that result from two webs of belief: religious and scientific.

The forced conversions of perhaps a third of the Jews of Spain in 1391 presented significant dilemmas for the Spanish Crown, the Spanish Church, and the conversos themselves. While the Church insisted that baptism, even by force, was irrevocable, instructing and assimilating so many converts was a major challenge. Conversos, too, were in a quandary: Some chose to relocate and revert to Judaism openly; others accepted their altered situation and not a few pursued new possibilities in Church and public roles; many married their children into Old Christian families. There were New Christians, however, who relinquished neither birthplace nor heritage, choosing to observe Judaism surreptitiously. By the last decades of the fifteenth century, when an increasingly anxious Church encouraged a reluctant Crown to establish an Inquisition directed at conversos engaging in Jewish practices, women had become a particular target. As Renée Levine Melammed observes in her detailed and well-argued analyses of Inquisition proceedings against women accused of judaizing, “The Inquisitors realized the unusual importance of the home in crypto-Judaism and understood that women willingly became the carriers of the tradition they viewed as inimical” (p. 15). Melammed's delineations of the interactions between these women and their adversaries in the inquisitorial courts demonstrates the determination of some conversa women to subvert the teachings of the Church and risk prison or death to provide for the Jewish continuity of their families.