Samuel ben Judah Ibn Tibbon, translator of the Guide of the Perplexed and of other treatises of Maimonides, is in many ways also the first interpreter of Maimonides' philosophic teaching. The orientation of his interpretation of Maimonides' philosophy is already seen in his early writings—epistles, critical notes appended to his translations of the Guide, a philosophic glossary and the introductions to his translations. His interpretation was extensively developed, however, in his later and more comprehensive treatises—the Commentary on Ecclesiastes and Ma'amar yiqqavu hamayim. These treatises are explicitly devoted to philosophic exegesis of biblical verses, but are deeply impregnated with the proper interpretation of Maimonides' philosophy and with its problematics. Samuel Ibn Tibbon's writing had a decisive influence on Maimonidean thinkers throughout the thirteenth century, among whom may be numbered the authors of two comprehensive commentaries on the Guide, Moses ben Solomon of Salerno, and Zerahiah ben Shealtiel Hen.

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.

If law is conceived of, as religious law must be, as a revelation of the divine will, then any attempt to align that will with human wants, any attempt to have reality control rather than to be itself controlled by the divine norm, is an act of blasphemy and is inconceivable to a God-fearing man. As the Middle Ages was an age of faith among Jews no less than among Christians and Muslims, the unalignability, the “nonadaptability”if you wish, of religious law is a premise which must underlie all our investigations and understanding of the history of Halakhah in the Middle Ages. Yet the contention of this paper is that at times the very intensity of religious conviction and observance can be conducive to a radical transformation of religious law, and that the very depth of religious attachment can play a supportive role in deflecting the divine norm from the path of its immanent development, and bring it into line with the needs and practices of the time.

Perhaps the most famous section of the second half of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities is the story of Alexander the Great and the Jews (AJ 11.302–47). It consists of three strands: a story about Manasses, Sanballat, and Alexander; a story about Jaddus and Alexander; and historical data about Philip II, Darius III, and Alexander the Great. In the first strand Manasses, a brother of the high priest Jaddus, marries the daughter of Sanballat, satrap of Samaria, and as a result is ejected from Jerusalem and flees to his father-in-law. Sanballat promises to build a new temple for him and his Jewish followers and intends to ask Darius to authorize the project. When Alexander is victorious, Sanballat transfers his allegiance to the Macedonian conqueror and receives permission from him to build a temple in Samaria. In the second strand, Alexander demands the submission of the Jews but Jaddus, the high priest, remains loyal to Darius.Furious at this rebuff, Alexander marches on Jerusalem. Encouraged by a dream, the high priest and the Jews greet Alexander outside the city. The conqueror of the world bows down before Jaddus and declares that it was Jaddus who had appeared to him in a dream three years earlier and had encouraged him to launch his expedition against Persia. Amidst general rejoicing, Alexander enters the temple, sacrifices to the God of Israel, and bestows gifts upon the Jews.

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

“Intersectionality,” a concept coined and developed by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how our various identities change in meaning and valence when placed in dynamic relation with one another. Instead of exploring identity traits like “race,” “gender,” “religion,” and so on in isolation, an intersectional approach asks what these various characteristics “do” to one another in combination. I suggest that an intersectional approach—asking “what does Whiteness do to Jewishness?”—can help illuminate elements of the Jewish experience that would otherwise remain obscure. The core claim is that Whiteness and Jewishness in combination function in ways that are not necessarily grasped if one atomizes the identities and holds them apart. What Whiteness “does” to Jewishness is act as an accelerant for certain forms of antisemitic marginalization even as it ratifies a racialized hierarchy within the Jewish community. Absent an intersectional vantage, many political projects and controversies surrounding Jewish equality will be systematically misunderstood.

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.

In De anima 3. 5 Aristotle distinguished two aspects in the activity of intellection or knowing: one active, the other passive. His remarks are notoriously obscure, and they have occasioned an enormous exegetical literature from antiquity to our own day. Besides laying the foundations of an epistemological edifice that remained intact for many centuries, Aristotle also suggested that the active factor in knowing is eternal and immortal. Thus, he retained in some form Plato's belief that there is a link between knowledge and immortality. Several of the leading ancient and medieval interpreters of Aristotle developed this suggestion into a complex doctrine of immortality, the main thesis of which was the idea that human perfection consists in union or conjunction with the active power in knowledge. This essay intends to examine Levi ben Gerson's (Gersonides) critique of the theory of immortality as conjunction. We begin with the psychological presuppositions of the theory.

According to rabbinic law, from the second century to the present, the offspring of a gentile mother and a Jewish father is a gentile, while the offspring of a Jewish mother and a gentile father is a Jew (albeit, according to the Mishnah, a mamzer, a Jew of impaired status). Each of these two rulings has its own history, as I shall show below, but it is convenient to group them together under the general heading of the “matrilineal principle.” Anthropologists and sociologists use the term matrilineal to describe societies in which kinship is determined through the females and not the males. Such societies once existed in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and can still be found in parts of Africa, India, and Polynesia. Although rabbinic society and family law have not yet been studied in the light of modern anthropological and sociological theories, it seems clear that the kinship patterns which characterize matrilineal societies are thoroughly foreign to rabbinic society. With only a few exceptions, rabbinic family law is patrilineal. Status, kinship, and succession are determined through the father. (“The family of the father is considered family, the family of the mother is not considered family,” B. Bava Batra 109b.) Why, then, did the rabbis adopt a matrilineal principle for the determination of the status of the offspring of mixed marriages?

The question of Jewish usury is usually perceived in straightforward terms. The Church unilaterally opposed Jewish lending, and the kings did all they could to promote it. In the long run, however, the utility of Jewish lending diminished, and the forces of the Church were thus able to prevail. The kings, too, soon began to outlaw Jewish lending.

The developments triggered or accelerated by the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881–1882 in Russia form a panorama of East European Jewish history at the end of the century: Zionism, the Bund, mass emigration and mass pauperization. The role of Hebrew literature in responding to these pogroms as well as to the later round of violence between 1903 and 1905 is significant for two reasons. In its own setting, Hebrew literature is crucial to an analysis of the consciousness of the period because it represents the response of an important segment of the intelligentsia of Russian Jewry, namely, those who associated themselves with national revival and its cultural medium, Hebrew. Hebrew fiction and poetry on the pogroms are also significant when studied in a vertical perspective, that is, in relationship to an evolved and elaborate set of traditions of response to catastrophe in Hebrew sources from the Bible and midrash through the piyyutim, chronicles, and consolation texts of the Middle Ages. Hebrew writing between 1881 and 1905 both partakes of that tradition and rebels against it, and in so doing reconstitutes the tradition; and it is that new tradition which must be confronted, evaded, or subverted when the literary imagination faces the more destructive pogroms of the World War I period and later the Holocaust itself.

Although religious history has traditionally concerned itself with the transcendent dimension in human life, and social history with the mundane, the latter approach can also be used to illuminate the ways in which religion works itself out on the social plane. In fact, it might be argued that inquiries of this sort should occupy a prominent place on the agenda of any social and religious history of the Jews. Among historians of the Annales school, for whom the study of material life was long considered the backbone of historical inquiry, there has been a discernible move in recent years toward the study of religious life, especially in its popular forms. Whereas, for example, previous volumes in the valuable Johns Hopkins series of “Selections from the Annales” were devoted to such topics as food and drink in history, the one published in 1982 was entitled, significantly, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred.

In the early stages of the modern rewriting of medieval Jewish history, the sources most consulted and adduced were narrative. As the enterprise has matured, further source genres have been discovered and utilized, thus allowing for improved understanding of the medieval Jewish experience. Of late, the reliability of narrative sources has come under question, but at the same time these narrative sources have been utilized in new and creative ways. To be sure, both the questioning and the innovative utilization of medieval Jewish narrative sources have been profoundly influenced by similar tendencies among general medievalists, as they seek to refine their tools of historical reconstruction.

One of the most celebrated aspects of rabbinic literature is its adducing of multiple interpretations of scriptural verses and its valorizing of multiple legal opinions as expressed in debate among the rabbinic sages. This celebration has come from several quarters, with each finding in the purported rabbinic polysemy and pluralism support for agendas that could not possibly have been those of the ancient rabbis. For example, in the 1980s, some literary critics and philosophers found support in rabbinic midrash for their theories of indeterminacy of textual meaning in literature and language in general. Likewise, moving from the linguistic to the social domain, those seeking more harmonious relations among modern Judaism's competing denominations have found a pluralistic model to emulate in ancient Judaism, following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when sectarian rivalry is thought to have been replaced by the “big tent” inclusiveness, marked by respectful debate among multiple opinions, of the rabbis at Yavneh.

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

Perhaps no one figure is more responsible for the legitimization of kabbalah as an authentic esoteric tradition of Judaism than Moses ben Nahman (1194–1270). Although from the beginnings of its literary history kabbalah was associated with men of rabbinic standing, such as R. Abraham ben David of Posquieres, no one before Nahmanides had attained a reputation for excellence in halakhic and mystical matters and had written extensively in both domains. Nahmanides' involvement with kabbalah, especially in the context of a commentary on the Torah written for the layman, as the author plainly states in his introduction, surely lent a stamp of approval to the whole enterprise. R. Shem Tov ibn Gaon in his Baddei ha-'Aron u-Migdal Hananel gave the following characterization of Nahmanides' kabbalistic literary activity:

The great rabbi, Moses ben Naḥman, may his memory be for a blessing, wrote his book [i.e., the commentary on the Torah] and a book [on] Job. He alluded to hidden matters in every place () to arouse [people's awareness] as is appropriate and according to what he received. However, he concealed his words to a high degree, for it is written, “Honey and milk are under your tongue” (Song of Songs 4: 11).

Throughout the Talmudic era, the Jewish community of Babylonia lived under Persian rule while Zoroastrianism, serving as a state religion, was enjoying something of a renaissance. In Babylonia, known in the later geographical literature as the Persian heartland, Jews lived alongside Persians. Babylonian Jews had also already experienced Persian rule for centuries prior to the Talmudic era under the Achaemenids, and later under the persianized Arsacid dynasty. This alone should have sufficed to lure a number of scholars into exploring various cross-cultural contacts between the two neighboring religious communities during this period. Until recently, however, scholarship has not been greatly drawn to this field, despite an exhaustive focus, of venerable antiquity, on the relationship between Israel and Persia in the biblical and Second Temple periods, including the Qumran library.

In this essay, I explore the history of what has conventionally been described as “Jewish music” research in relation to parallel developments in both ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century. As a case study, I argue, the issues inherent in understanding Jewish music's historical trajectory offer a complex portrait of scholarship that spans the discourses of community, practice, identity, and ideology. Subject to the principles of Wissenschaft since the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish music study has constantly negotiated the lines between the scholar and practitioner; between the seminary, the conservatory, and the university; between the good of science, the assertion of a coherent Jewish narrative in history, and the perceived need to reconnect an attenuating Jewish populace with its reinvented traditions; and between the core questions of musicology, comparative musicology, theology, and modern ethnomusicology.

In a previous article, I studied the short and anonymous Hebrew First Crusade chronicle. The choice of text S as the starting point for an investigation of the three surviving records of Jewish suffering and heroism in 1096 was a natural one. The text, as it now stands, constitutes a wellorganized and coherent unit, broken off suddenly during the depiction of the destruction of Mayence Jewry. While it is certain that the chronicler did not witness personally all the events which he described, he did integrate his written and oral sources into an account which exhibits a broad and consistent grasp of the unfolding of the First Crusade and the related violence which inundated Rhineland Jewry.

L, the longest of the Hebrew First Crusade chronicles, is more difficult to analyze, partly because of the length of the text, partly because of its poor state of preservation, and partly because the awkwardness of the chronicler has left tantalizing hints regarding the process of editing. Like S, L is based on a series of written and oral sources. The editor of L, however, was less adroit than the editor of S in fusing his sources into a satisfying unit. Because of this lack of grace, the hand of the editor is more apparent in L, although the precise dimensions of his role cannot be fully clarified on the basis of the texts currently available. While the problems associated with L are vexing, its richness of detail and its power necessitate an effort to clarify some of these problems and to suggest tentative solutions. Many of our conclusions will be speculative; the state of the text and its sister texts will allow no more.

For the Jews of France, as for their fellow countrymen, the French Revolution came to constitute the myth of origin, the birthdate of a new existence. On September 27, 1791, two years after the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the French National Assembly voted to admit the Jews of Alsace-Lorraine to citizenship. Subsequent generations would recall this momentous event as a turning point of extraordinary magnitude, and would view themselves as compelling evidence of its transformative power. Their memories tended to be dominated by images of celebration and glory, comparing the Revolution to the Sinaitic revelation and referring to it in messianic-redemptive terms. Not surprisingly, the many setbacks and misfortunes suffered by the generation of 1789 were largely absent from these recollections, while only meager appreciation for the complexities introduced into Jewish cultural life can be detected in the half-century following the Revolution. Even more significant was the ascendant historical view, undoubtedly colored by a pervading sense of optimism among leaders of French Jewry, that credited the Revolution with having put an end to centuries of humiliation, legal discrimination, and exclusion from the mainstream of society.