In a letter dated October 19, 1917, Franz Rosenzweig—the German Jewish philosopher considered by many to be one of the central Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century—writes the following: “I can definitely understand . . . him [a common friend] being an antisemite for religious reasons. . . . [But] that he is an antisemite for racial reasons [Rassewegen]—I am very sorry [I cannot understand such a thing], because for him this is simply following the spirit of the times!”F. Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher, in Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk [= Gesammelte Schriften] (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 1: 473 (an Margrit Rosenstock). Further on Rosenzweig criticizes the “scandal” of hatred of the Jews that is even found among Christians who became Jews (a distinction that emphasizes the racial—and not religious—origins of this hatred.)

The story of the composition and reception of the sixteenth-century code of Jewish law, the Shulḥan ‘Arukh, has been told by many scholars, including my late teacher, Professor Isadore Twersky.Isadore Twersky, “The Shulḥan ‘Arukh: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” Judaism 16 (1967), 141–158, reprinted in The Jewish Expression, ed. Judah Goldin (New Haven, 1976), pp. 322–343. Cf. Isadore Twersky, “Ha-Rav Yosef Qaro ba‘al ha-Shulḥan ‘Arukh,” Asufot 3 (1989), 245–262. See also Chaim Tchernowitz, Toledot ha-Posqim, vol. 3 (New York, 1947); Yizhaq Raphael, ed., Rabi Yosef Qaro: ‘Iyunim u-meḥqarim be-mishnat Maran Ba‘al ha-Shulḥan ‘Arukh (Jerusalem, 1969); Menachem Elon, Ha-Mishpat ha-‘Ivri: toledotav, meqorotav, ‘eqronotav, 2nd ed. (Jerusalem, 1978); Asher Siev (Ziv), Rabeinu Mosheh Isserles (Rema) (New York, 1972); R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1977); Meir Benayahu, Yosef Beḥiri: Maran Rabi Yosef Qaro (Jerusalem, 1991); Israel Ta-Shma, “Rabbi Joseph Caro and His Beit Yosef: Between Spain and Germany,” in Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy, ed. Haim Beinart, vol. 2 (Jerusalem, 1992), pp. 192–206 (the article originally appeared in Hebrew in Tarbiz 59 [1990]: 153–170); Eric (Yizhaq) Zimmer, Gaḥalatan shel Ḥakhamim: peraqim be-toledot ha-rabanut be-Germanyah ba-me'ah ha-shesh-‘esreh uva-me'ah ha-sheva‘-‘esreh (Jerusalem, 1999), pp. 177–237. It is intertwined with a second story, namely, the formation of Ashkenazic Jewish identity.An excellent recent study of identity-formation among a group of early modern Jews is Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, IN, 1997). The formation of Polish Jewish identity was the topic of Adam Teller's lecture, “Yeven Metzula and the Formation of Jewish Self-Consciousness in Eastern Europe,” which I was privileged to hear, and which is expected to appear in Jewish History in a special issue on the massacres of 1648. On the treatment of Ashkenazic and Sefardic Jews in Jewish historiography, see Ismar Schorsch, “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 34 (1989), 47–66. On halakhic aspects of the differences between the two groups, see Hirsch Jacob Zimmels, Ashkenazim and Sephardim: Their Relations, Differences, and Problems as Reflected in the Rabbinical Responsa (Oxford, 1958).

Biblical sources that speak of God's participation in human courts notwithstanding, the judicial decision-making process is a human act.On biblical sources, see Ḥanina Ben-Menaḥem, “Postscript: The Judicial Process and the Nature of Jewish Law,” in An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, ed. N. Hecht et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 423–424, 434. Rabbinic authorities, like judges in other legal systems, are fully subject to the many factors beyond the formal rubric of the law that influence interpretation, including educational background and personal experiences and values.From a historical perspective, there is no place for conjectures that halakhic decision-making simply uncovers what was already revealed at Sinai or that it reflects ongoing divine revelation. See the summary of such views in Aaron Kirschenbaum, “Subjectivity in Rabbinic Decision-Making,” in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Moshe Sokol (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), pp. 63–64, 66–67. A criticism of judges as “living oracles” of the law who simply pronounce the meaning of various statutes in general jurisprudence can be found in Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930; reprint ed., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), pp. 35–36. Still, construing jurists may not always be aware of the existence of such non-legal considerations in their thought, and the influence that such concerns wield may rest just beneath their consciousness.See Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 167. Even when they were aware of the influence of extra-legal factors, medieval and pre-modern Ashkenazic rabbis seldom, if ever, revealed them in the course of their halakhic discussions, for the halakhah, like any other legal system, has its own terms of discourse that rarely admit uncloaked expressions of extra-legal concerns into its process of reasoning.Hanina Ben-Menahem, Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law (Chur: Harwood, 1991), p. 13, argues that extralegal considerations were accepted in the decision-making process of the Babylonian Talmud but were rendered normative halakhic criteria by their incorporation into the halakhah by post-talmudic authorities. An extended discussion of extra-halakhic considerations in the legal thinking of Rabbi David Ibn Zimra (Egypt, Safed; 1479–1573) can be found in Samuel Morell, “Darkei ha-shikul be-meṣiut ha-speṣifit be-piskat ha-RaDBaZ,” in ‘Atarah le-Ḥayyim: Meḥkarim be-sifrut ha-talmudit ve-ha-rabbanit le-khevod Professor Ḥayyim Zalman Dimitrovski, ed. Daniel Boyarin et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), pp. 413–438. On the question of determining matters based on internal legal standards alone, see Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 12–13, 23–24, comments germane to the halakhic endeavor as well.

The following article has emerged from an experimental, interdisciplinary course, co-taught by the authors in the fall of 1996, entitled “Exile: Jews, Literature, and History.” From the dozens of primary texts used in the course, we have selected six to illustrate the literary-conceptual analysis employed. Beyond the intrinsic aesthetic appeal of the passages, they have been chosen to exemplify the diversity of relevant material: in genre (poetry, disputational and homiletical literature, drama, fiction, memoir), cultural-historical context over the past millenium (Muslim and Christian Spain, eastern Europe, twentieth-century Egypt and Israel), community (Sephardic, Ashkenazic, and Middle Eastern Jews) and language of authorship (Hebrew, Arabic, and English). Starting with one of the most familiar texts of post-biblical Jewish literature, we move in the modern period to decidedly less-known works, challenging simplistic assumptions about “canon” in research about the Jewish past. The juxtaposition of pre-modern and modern texts is intended to highlight both the continuities and the ruptures brought by the twentieth century.The authors would like to express their gratitude to the William T. Kemper Foundation for sponsoring the Faculty Award program at Washington University in St. Louis that supported the development of this course.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the representational realist painter Israel Hershberg in his Jerusalem studio, where he was busy working on a small painting, one of a series of “tree portraits.” It was an exquisite work, in which each dappling of light on every needle of a towering cypress was exactingly represented on a miniature scale. But I was startled to see that, while he had blocked out the shape of the tree and the general parameters of light and shade “in the wild,” this champion of rendering from life was actually completing most of the painting in the studio. At first I thought the tree must be outside the window, or that he must be working from a photograph, but when I asked him where the detailing was coming from, he tapped his finger to his forehead.

“Though [Ludwig] Lewisohn lacked to a remarkable degree the ability to look beyond his own ideas,” wrote the literary critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin, “he had at least one paramount service to perform, and he failed in it as much for reasons beyond his control as through his own rigidity of mind and supreme lack of humility. For what Lewisohn was always declaiming, out of his self-consciousness in America and his Hebraism, was . . . that if a writer is not rooted in a native culture, if he does not belong or find happiness in his belonging, he is nothing.”See Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), pp. 280–281.

This book, by the late professor of biblical studies at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, is a companion volume to his Toward a Grammar of Biblical Poetics (Oxford, 1992), in which, by utilizing rhetorical or poetic techniques, he first made the case for the aesthetic wholeness of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas the first volume analyzed narrative texts relating to the prophets, in this volume Herbert Brichto devotes his literary analysis to the early Genesis narratives, including the Creation, Flood, and Abraham stories.

Benjamin D. Sommer elevates the analysis of inner-biblical interpretation to the next level of sophistication and rigor in this volume, a substantially revised version of his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Michael Fishbane. He focuses on the reuse of older biblical material in a specific biblical text, Isaiah 40–66. These chapters of the book of Isaiah, seen as an addition made a century and a half later to Isaiah 1–39, are assigned to an anonymous sixth-century prophet called, for the sake of convenience, Deutero-Isaiah. By treating the reuse of older biblical material in Deutero-Isaiah, Sommer is able to delineate what might be distinctive in Deutero-Isaiah's methods of inner-biblical interpretation, a desirable next step in the analysis of inner-biblical interpretation. What is impressive in Sommer's book is his ability to move to larger issues in biblical studies and to parallel issues in other academic and intellectual pursuits often ignored in biblical studies. The book also exhibits a clarity of writing and argument in what in many ways is a highly technical subject.

Boccaccini makes two important contributions in this work: he employs the methods of intellectual history to give a novel account of the origins of the Qumran community and he seeks to overcome the supersessionism characteristic of Christian studies of ancient Judaism.

Erich S. Gruen, a leading Greco-Roman historian, here presents the results of several years of research in the field of Jewish history. Positioning himself as the gadfly in his adopted field, he describes certain consensus positions of scholars in Jewish studies and proceeds seriatim to question or deconstruct them. This makes for interesting reading, and in some cases a significant challenge to the standard views of textbooks on the subject. Only some of his challenges can be mentioned here.

Understanding the authority of “the rabbis,” the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud who lived during the first five centuries of the common era, has always been a tricky business. The sages grounded their authority on the concept of the dual Torah—the belief that God revealed to Moses, in addition to the written Torah, an oral Torah, which was passed down in an unbroken chain from generation to generation. However, the emergence of Jewish historical consciousness during the Enlightenment rendered this view difficult to maintain. The rise of critical biblical studies revealed a gap between the religion of the Bible and Rabbinic Judaism. On what basis, then, are the pronouncements of the talmudic sages authoritative for subsequent generations of Jews?

In this book, which is a slightly revised version of his dissertation, Aryeh Cohen tackles the challenge of reading the Babylonian Talmud as “literature.” This is a complex task, because the basis for a literary reading is not readily apparent. Large portions of the Bavli consist of logically dense legal argumentation. Cohen is to be commended for making these dense passages that comprise the overwhelmingly larger part of the Bavli the central topic of his analysis, for they give the Bavli its most distinctive literary qualities. Other approaches focus on subunits of rabbinic literature that are overtly literary, like parables or sage stories (ma‘asim). While these approaches stress the literary qualities of rabbinic literature, as Cohen notes, they treat the subunits in isolation and consequently ignore the meaning conferred upon them by their broader contexts.

Josef Stern's book “focuses on two elements in the Maimonidean revolution in the study of ta‘amei ha-miṣvot and their impact on Naḥmanides. The first is Maimonides' idea of the problematic commandment. The second is his idea that explanations of commandments—both individual laws and the . . . totality of commandments as a whole . . . should be modelled after the multileveled interpretation of parables” (p. 3). In Chapters Two, Three, and Six, Stern discusses Maimonides' well-known “historically sensitive, context-dependent . . . explanations for the legislation of the ḥuqqim” (p. 4). While Stern briefly touches upon a number of problems that Maimonides grapples with in light of these explanations, he focuses on “specific arguments the Guide contains to counter the antinomianism implicit in its explanation of the ḥuqqim” (p. 5). Stern's arguments and readings in these chapters are thoughtful and suggestive, if at times open to question, but space constraints prevent an analysis.hey also prevent my paying more than the barest attention to Stern's remarks about Naḥmanides. Rather, I will concentrate on the second focus of Stern's work, contained in Chapters One, Two, and Five; namely, his understanding of “Maimonides' theory of multileveled parabolic interpretation” (p. 68) and his claim that Maimonides extends this “parabolic model to the explanation of the commandments” (p. 11).

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of studies devoted to medieval Hebrew science, but few editions and explications of texts. In this book, Ruth Glasner provides a critical edition and exhaustive analysis of two polemical letters pertaining to physics by the fourteenth-century Provençal poet and philosopher Jedaiah ha-Penini (Bedersi) (born ca. 1285). These letters were largely forgotten until S. Pines drew attention to their significance and called for their publication over thirty years ago. That call has been answered in exemplary fashion in the present volume.

Late-antique Israel enjoyed astonishing literary creativity and output in the form of the piyyut, which offered a poetic alternative to the standard liturgical language. The treasures from the Genizah have enriched our knowledge of the paytanim of this period, and important collections of the works of Yosi ben Yosi, Yannai, Shimon bar Megas, and Kallir have been compiled in recent years. But alongside these well-known paytanim were others, often anonymous but sometimes not, thanks to the use of name acrostics, a characteristic style of the piyyut. Numerous compositions identify a paytan whose name was Yehudah, and now his oeuvre has been ably compiled by van Bekkum.

Ruth Langer's meticulously researched volume fills a gap in the study of Jewish liturgy. While many histories of the liturgy focus on the origins, use of language, and literary aspects of the texts, Langer's study provides an analysis of some of the dynamics that shaped the halakhot dealing with prayer, thus impacting directly upon the spiritual life of Jews. How did the legal system that discussed issues regarding the liturgy develop? What questions were asked, and around which factors did disputes come about? What concepts and practices contributed to the resolution of differences? As Langer notes in her preface, a significant force in the formation of rabbinic prayer and the legal system undergirding it was the principle of worship as an evolving phenomenon. Once prayer is understood as both a communal and an individual response to God's covenant with Israel, the intricacies of the liturgical system must be developed and justified. They must express the history of the community as well as the existential needs of the person of faith.

For more than a decade, Chava Weissler has called on readers to listen to the voices of matriarchs. Her numerous articles on tkhines—Yiddish prayers for private devotion typically recited by women of early modernity—have appeared in a wide variety of academic and, to a much lesser extent, popular publications. At once folklorist, ethnographer, literary critic, and student of classical Jewish texts and mysticism, Weissler has time and again applied her training in elite fields of learning to non-elite sources. While initially interested in merely “recover[ing] women's religious experience and contrast[ing] it to men's,” her objectives have broadened over the years to include “understanding the tkhines within the matrix of Ashkenazic Judaism” (pp. xii–xiii). Most recently, Weissler has turned to interpreting how tkhines influenced twentieth-century Jewish religious life in communities as diverse as Conservative Jewry and feminist ritual groups.

Few critical terms in use over the past two decades have been so abused and hence rendered almost meaningless as “postmodern.” And yet the term can be used to advantage to describe a period, its critical suppositions, and its inherent dispositions. It does signify the blurring of categories and styles, the shifting of identities, the often self-conscious invasion of the objective by the subjective. When the author of a serious scholarly study of a complex, seminal religious figure—a major influence and icon in modern Jewish narrative art like Reb Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810)—designates herself a postmodern and conducts her investigation as a postmodernist scholar, we cannot ignore this hermeneutic stance.

Fields such as Jewish cultural history and women's studies, where interest in nineteenth-century Berlin Jewish literary salon society continues to grow, converge at the emblematic example of Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Heidi Thomann Tewarson's new biography, Rahel Levin Varnhagen: The Life and Work of a German Jewish Intellectual, is the first to address the English reader since Hannah Arendt's recently reissued Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, originally published in 1957. As such, Tewarson has incorporated the most up-to-date research on this figure and period, otherwise available almost solely in German. Arendt's work has traditionally been read as part biography and part autobiography—as much about identification and coming to terms with Jewish identity as a German Jewish woman intellectual in 1930s Berlin as it is about the salon period. Tewarson has taken a different tack. Rather than focusing on the life of a Jewess per se, Tewarson is interested in the work of an intellectual. What constitutes the legitimate, creative work of an intellectual? And can the term itself be gender-free? These questions, though necessarily tied to Rahel's place outside the literary and cultural mainstream, serve as the main thrust of the book.

This is a superb study of post-Holocaust theology, perhaps the best study of its kind since Steven Katz's Post-Holocaust Dialogues. Zachary Braiterman focuses on three of the most important post-Holocaust theologians—Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackeheim—in an attempt to demonstrate that all three thinkers share a common discourse rooted in a theological sensibility which Braiterman identifies as “antitheodicy,” a term he has coined. Antitheodicy refers to a position which rejects theodicy—that is, any attempt to justify God in the face of catastrophic suffering or to see redeeming value in it, even if one continues to believe in God. Braiterman also makes use of postmodern insights to explore the dynamic of how the three post-Holocaust theologians reread or misread the traditional sources in order to catapult antitheodic discourse from the margins of Jewish thought into its center.