In its first season, Israeli television thriller Fauda proclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel “proper” and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never historicize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre of mistaʿaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew.

Through a linguistic analysis of the Hebrew Lord's Prayer, this article endeavors to reach a new understanding of the function of this text in the lives of its users, concluding that the ninth-century Carolingian writer/translator meant for this text to be sung aloud. This article goes back to the basics of textual research—philology and language study—in order to determine the correct historical framework through which to understand this much-debated text, thus adding to our understanding of the religious life and practice of the nuns of Essen at the polyglottic crossroads of Latin and German, Hebrew and Greek. This paper is also an invitation for future studies to continue its effort to rewrite the history of Hebrew in the church, for historians to broaden their toolbox, and for linguists and philologists to contribute their insights to other fields.

Paul opens his First Epistle to the Corinthians with the exhortation “Now I appeal to you, brothers [and sisters], … that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose” (1:10). This plea is strikingly similar to a passage in Sifre Deuteronomy 96, where the words lo titgodedu are interpreted as “Do not be made into gatherings/factions [ʾagudot]; rather, be all of you one gathering [ʾagudah].” Analyzing these sources in depth, this article argues that Paul was familiar with this early rabbinic midrash in an oral form. It also explores the possibility that Paul used another early rabbinic tradition on unity, which is found in the Mekhilta de-miluʾim section of the Sifra. If Paul indeed knew certain rabbinic oral traditions, then he was an independent interpreter of Scripture, who read Scripture in the original Hebrew. Further, even if Paul's audience consisted primarily of gentiles, the legal norms he sought to institute among them were based on Jewish traditions. Finally, Paul follows his exhortation against schismata with the names of specific groups in Corinth, which demonstrates that he understood the tannaitic tradition as a normative principle, meant to be applied to specific disagreements. If so, other first-century Jews also likely understood lo titgodedu as a concrete halakhic prohibition.

This article examines a story in the Jerusalem Talmud depicting a wealthy woman who expects Torah instruction in exchange for her tithes. This textual example is used as a lens through which to view the changing social, religious, and economic relationships of Roman Syria Palaestina, whereby the biblically described institution of tithing to priests expanded to include priestly descendent rabbis. Giving the priestly tithe to a rabbi, while advantageous in a period of rabbinic fundraising, presented a distinct set of challenges as it came to resemble patronage practices associated with Roman elites. Through close textual analysis of the wealthy woman's tithe, the prominence and consequences of scholastic donations are examined, both in rabbinic literature and in the broader late ancient Mediterranean.1

This article offers a new approach to Profayt Duran's Reproach of the Gentiles (Kelimat ha-goyim), emphasizing the particular place accorded to Paul in this work and reading it against the background of converso Paulinism. This article integrates the idea of Paul the Jew in Reproach of the Gentiles with the broader ideology that Duran developed regarding the forced converts (ʾanusim) in his other writings. To some extent, based on the ambivalence in his views and his divided personality, Paul could serve as a model for those conversos now required to develop, like him, a divided identity and ambivalent positions. Thus, Profayt Duran should be considered a forerunner of converso Paulinism.

Hunting scenes are common in Jewish illuminated manuscripts and are understood as allegories of the Jew, usually represented as a hare or a deer, being persecuted by the Christian, shown as a hunter and his dogs. This article will discuss a hunt scene from the Worms Maḥzor, an Ashkenazic illuminated prayer book produced in 1272, probably in Würzburg. At the top of folio 130r, an illumination of the piyyut (liturgical poem) “ʾAyelet ʾahavim” (the loving hind, or doe) for Shavuot displays a deer being hunted by a devilish hunter and his dogs. Examining the illustration in the context of contemporary textual evidence, I shall demonstrate that the deer in the Worms Maḥzor portrays the Torah itself being persecuted by the hunter, who can be understood not only as a Christian or Esau, but also as Jesus.

As Soviet Jews returned to their hometowns after the Holocaust, they encountered a catastrophic landscape of mass graves that defied Jewish traditions of dignified, secure burial. Throughout the postwar decades, survivors strove to bring their relatives “to a Jewish grave”—in other words, to provide them a burial consistent with Jewish burial norms. These norms included the desire to bury children beside their parents, concern for the physical security and legal status of grave plots, a reluctance to disturb the dead, and a fear of exposing human remains to public view. Given the chaotic circumstances under which these graves had been created, it was impossible to uphold all four principles. Thus, some survivors chose to transfer mass graves to the local Jewish cemetery immediately after the war. Other communities chose to mark and preserve the graves at their original locations, only opting for exhumation in the face of a direct threat such as erosion. Although grave exhumation is generally prohibited in Jewish tradition, Soviet Jews did not embrace exhumation out of religious ignorance, but instead performed them out of a desire to approximate traditional Jewish burial norms under novel, catastrophic circumstances. Thus, these exhumations illustrate how traditional values and practices can continue to linger and evolve, even in the absence of religious texts, institutions, and clergy.

This paper explores the visual sources that inspired Felix Salten's Bambi, Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde (1923), and its postpublication legacy in America, Poland, India, Israel, and Russia. While both Jewish and non-Jewish artists embraced the hunted deer motif as their own “national folktale,” the Jewish roots of the visual motif are critical to understanding the revisions and adaptations of the tale in the mid-twentieth century. The case of the myriad revamps of Bambi demonstrates that the nationalist idiom was so elastic in the mid-twentieth century that it functioned as an aesthetic mode rather than an a priori category of identity. At the center of the analysis is the contention that Jewish artists, filmmakers, and writers used the aesthetic properties of the nationalist idiom not only to forge a path to political agency but also to build a shelter from the nation-state.

This article revisits rabbinic laws of menstrual impurity by comparing them to the parallel laws of male impurity. The prevailing scholarly paradigm has examined menstrual purity laws through the lens of cultural criticism and gender analysis, demonstrating that the sages molded the legal discourse of this field to construct their own authority vis-à-vis the women they describe. By contrast, this article argues that a comparison of menstrual impurity laws with the laws of male impurities discloses substantial parallels that have not been sufficiently explored. This comparison demonstrates that the rabbis developed similar legal categories for both men and women, revealing more about their systematic legal thinking than about their gender economy. Tracing the development of both male and female impurities through rabbinic sources thus has the potential to uncover not only the gendered constructions engaged by the rabbis, but also fundamental rabbinic ideas about the body, legal knowledge, and rabbinic expertise.

This essay treats the contradictions that beset Samuel Hirsch's Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden in order to clarify the nature of the study of modern Jewish thought. I begin by examining how Emil Fackenheim presents the contradiction in Hirsch's thought as evidence of the incompatible assumptions underlying dominant strands of modern philosophy and “authentic” Jewish theology. Agreeing with Fackenheim that Hirsch's work is contradictory, this essay diverges on both the nature of this contradiction and its implications for Jewish thought. I claim that the argument of Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden founders as a result of Hirsch's refusal to choose between three different, and ultimately incompatible, strategies for articulating the relationship between God and human beings. I then conclude by exploring the implications of the collapse of Hirsch's position with regard to the dispute between theocentrists and ethical monotheists and for the field of modern Jewish thought more broadly.

After World War II, interest in Yiddish literature, and in Yiddish culture more broadly, began to develop beyond immigrant and Yiddishist spheres in America. Encompassing both popular and academic works, and some in between, this interest was driven by various impulses, some political, from the Left, including from communists, fellow travelers, the labor Left, and others, and some only indirectly political. And there emerged, unexpectedly, a conservative strain of interest. This article will examine the conservative approach to Yiddish studies and some of the ways it manifested itself in scholarship and culture. I ask how this shift in interest in Yiddish is related to the decline of the Jewish Left and to the rise of Zionist thought among the major Jewish Diaspora communities. As a case study, I will explore how these trends in Yiddish scholarship were expressed in the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, particularly in his novel Shadows on the Hudson (1957–58).

Rabbi Jacob ben Meir, better known as Rabbenu Tam (1100–1171), is famous for his radical interpretations of the Talmud and his influence in matters of Halakhah. Less well known is his abiding interest in the textual transmission of the Talmud and its manuscripts. Rabbenu Tam was well aware of the redactional layers within the Talmud, and in many instances, claimed that certain sentences were a later addition to the Talmud inserted by students and copyists over the generations. As a result, Rabbenu Tam did not hesitate to challenge the binding legal authority of those accretions. The introduction to Rabbenu Tam's Sefer ha-yashar argues that the received text of the Babylonian Talmud was corrupt and that the text had been influenced by glosses suggested by Rashi and other sages. In his opinion, textual corrections ought to be raised in the context of commentaries and not inserted within the Talmud itself. This article will describe the relationship between the principles proposed in the introduction to Sefer ha-yashar and Rabbenu Tam's actual engagement with the talmudic text in his exegesis.

Among Maimonides's many statements about extrascriptural laws in rabbinic literature, none has attracted as much attention as principle 2 in his Book of the Commandments. Modern scholars have largely understood this text to claim that very few of the laws found in rabbinic literature are Sinaitic in origin and of biblical status. Yet, until the twentieth century, principle 2 was primarily read as distinguishing between revealed laws that constitute enumerated commandments and revealed laws that do not. In fact, neither reading is consistent with other Maimonidean statements. By contextualizing principle 2 within the Book of the Commandments, this essay reconsiders Maimonides's enumeration of the commandments and argues that many of the problems that principle 2 was designed to address, and that it also generated, resulted from the incongruity of his project of enumerating precisely 613 commandments alongside his understanding of revelation as a corpus that included not only the Written Torah but innumerable extrascriptural traditions as well. An appendix evaluates pertinent aspects of the most recent monograph dedicated to Maimonides's scriptural hermeneutics.

The sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

During the mid-1990s the Australian literary scene was shaken by controversy over issues of antisemitism and Holocaust representation in Helen Demidenko's debut novel, The Hand That Signed the Paper. In 2017, Darville reissued the novel. At a time when debate is raging over the nature and limits of freedom of expression and the status of words and facts, this was a provocative move. This article revisits The Hand in order to resolve the issues of literary antisemitism and freedom of speech that it raised in 1994 and continues to raise today. I apply Avishai Margalit's notion of an “ethics of memory” to the autofictional text in order to develop a theory of an “ethics of narration” in literary fiction. This narrative ethics enables distinctions to be made in relation to truth claims and fictionality, which were opaque in Demidenko's original autofiction and remain unresolved in the reissued version.

The paper looks at several episodes in which R. Yirmiyah is rebuked for questions that are portrayed as epistemologically destabilizing to the rabbinic legal project. I argue that R. Yirmiyah is portrayed as a caricature of late rabbinic scholastic thought, and that his characterization enables the writers of the Bavli to hold their own scholastic tendencies up to critique while also drawing protective boundaries around the analytical direction their legal culture has taken. I also read the passages together to demonstrate that the Bavli functions as a unified literary work in previously unacknowledged ways. These episodes form a sort of nonlinear plot, a web of stories that produce a character with his own “history.” There may be no historical rabbinic nuisance named R. Yirmiyah, but there is certainly a constructed literary one, whose reappearance throughout the Talmud plays an important role in working out tensions within the rabbinic legal project.