The messianic dream owes its roots to biblical prophecy and its rich development to generations of sensitive and creative exegetes anxiously awaiting redemption. Scripture itself is less than generous in providing detailed information about the end of days, so ungenerous, in fact, that some modern scholars have expressed skepticism about the very appearance of a messianic figure in the biblical text. While this skepticism is excessive, it reflects a reality which troubled the ancients no less than the moderns and left room for the diversity and complexity that mark the messianic idea by late antiquity.

Gershom Scholem points out that within Judaism the concept of redemption does not merely consist of an abstract feeling but entails a belief in a concrete physical redemption, publicly visible in this world and taking place on the stage of history and within the community. However, it projects the realization of this hope to the future, therefore making Jewish life provisional, incomplete, and unfulfilled—a “life lived in deferment.” The history of the Passover seder illustrates how both aspects of this outlook became expressed in a specific time and place. But it also indicates that the hope was not always projected into the future, for we find people who both believed in a physical redemption and at the same time tried to internalize redemption in their own lives.

A storehouse of narratives can be found within the literature which emerged from and gave expression to the spiritual developments in sixteenth-century Safed. These include legends, moral tales and exempla, anecdotes, and parables which can be garnered from the volumes of the kabbalistic ethical works and other literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. In this study we shall seek to explore two such narratives of that period, stories which, while quite different from one another in character, both draw upon much earlier narrative traditions which have been subtly but radically remolded. The immediate aim of tracing the prehistory of these two stories and their routes of metamorphosis and of comparing the Safed stories with the sources which lie behind them is to clarify the literary and historical significance of the two narratives in the precise form which they acquired in the Safed experience. On a broader scale, such exploration might serve to exemplify the transformation of narrative traditions under the impact of a worldview and a cultural-spiritual milieu.

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?

For close to fifty years, Cyrus Adler was one of American Jewry's most influential communal leaders and public servants. Taking part in the founding of the Jewish Publication Society (1888), on whose various committees he would serve as chairman throughout his life, Adler was a founder of the American Jewish Historical Society (1892), and its president for more than twenty years. Together with Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, Felix Warburg, and his cousin, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Adler played an instrumental role in organizing the American Jewish Committee (1906), and served as its president from 1929 until his death in 1940. During his thirtytwo years (1908–1940) as president and chief administrative officer of the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Adler shaped the institution into one of the preeminent institutions of higher Jewish learning in America. When Solomon Schechter died in 1915, Adler succeeded him to the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary, with which he had been closely associated since its founding in 1886, while remaining president of Dropsie as well. Serving as president of the seminary for twenty-five years, Adler played a central role in the founding of the United Synagogue, whose presidency he also held.

Religious thought and observance almost never exist in a self-contained vacuum but are rather influenced, to a greater or lesser extent, by their social and ideological surroundings. A study of the spiritual life of early Victorian Jewry provides a good example of this law of history and shows how a Jewish community's religious beliefs and actions can be shaped and even dominated by the influence of its Gentile host society. An analysis of early Victorian Judaism is really an investigation into the social dynamics of the London community and a study of how the endeavors of its various factions to adapt to the mid-nineteenth-century English world affected its religious life.

Within the steadily growing body of fiction written by David Shahar over the past three decades, his trilogy of novels, The Palace of Shattered Vessels, stands out as his most remarkable achievement to date. It is a complex, often puzzling work, steeped in the spirit of Jerusalem, in which it is set, bold in the narrative techniques it employs, and ambitious in its thematic aspirations a meandering stream of fragmented memories flowing through the mind of its unnamed narrator. As the flow continues, these fragments gradually cohere into broad arcs of interlocking narrative circles that effect a vivid evocation of Jerusalem and its inhabitants as they were in the early decades of this century. But The Palace of Shattered Vessels aims at being much more than a memorial tribute to a nearly forgotten era in a rapidly changing city.

The main goal of this paper is to determine and describe the poetics of composition of the Hebrew short story in the Enlightenment (Haskalah) period. (The Haskalah was a major literary movement in Hebrew literature, mainly in Germany, Austria, and Russia, from 1780 to 1870. This movement evolved in three distinct phases: neoclassic, romantic, and realistic.) The narrative of the Haskalah period has received considerable attention from many critics and researchers, beginning with the first critics of Hebrew literature (such as Kovner, Brainin, Paperna, and Lilienblum), through critics of the early twentieth century (such as Feitelson, Robinson, Zitron, Zinberg, Frischmann, Slouschz, Shapira, Klausner, and Lachower), up to contemporary critics (Patterson, Weinfeld, Wersses, Shaked, Miron, Feingold, and others).