Ithamar Gruenwald's recent book brings together various essays the author has published over the last few years, each seeking to rethink aspects of ritual theory, especially as applied to the rituals of ancient Israel. After introducing his themes and approach in the first chapter, Gruenwald addresses (in Chapter 2) what he calls the “economic ethos” of ancient Israel, speculating that “in the history of ancient Israel, the transition from ethos to religion is connected to the passage from nomadic lifestyle to an urban one” (p. 67). The third chapter reexamines the relationship between myth and ritual. The last three chapters are devoted to ritual theory as it pertains, respectively, to rabbinic halakhah (Chapter 4), biblical sacrifice (Chapter 5), and the “Lord's Supper,” as related primarily in the writings of Paul. Throughout the book, Gruenwald emerges as an emphatic spokesperson for the non-symbolic nature of rituals in general, and of biblical sacrifice in particular. While this book is wide-ranging in scope, a significant portion of chapters 2 and 6 are devoted to the stated theme of chapter 5: biblical sacrifice. Because Gruenwald himself believes that “sacrifices constitute the core of religion” (p. 189), perhaps the best way to review his complicated book briefly is to examine his approach to this particular ritual structure.

Chapter 1 introduces Jacobs' methodology. He summarizes the main critical approaches to Jerusalem as a Christian Holy Land in the fourth to the sixth centuries, and outlines the purpose and usefulness of postcolonial criticism as applied to the Christian writings and geography. The book is laid out thematically and at times in sequence, reflecting the central premise of the book, that “the colonizer and colonized cannot remain fixed binary subjects in the perpetually shifting contest of power and identity” (9).

The central thesis of Lorberbaum's book is that according to the rabbis, the meaning of imago dei is that there is tangible divine presence within every human being. This concept impacted primarily upon two areas of halakhah: the death penalty and procreation. Since humans are physical representations of God, execution is equivalent in some ways to deicide. Conversely, procreation is strongly mandated because it increases God's physical manifestation in the world by creating more vehicles in which to embody God's presence. Importantly, as “images” of the divine, human beings function as icons in a manner similar to the way idols function in the pagan world; they draw God's presence into themselves, blurring the borders between representation and form. Finally, the drawing of God's presence into the human body dictates that human beings are embodied with significant theurgic powers.

Kessler's erudite book aims to prove not only that exegetical encounters occurred between the ancient rabbis and the early church fathers in both directions, but also that “to understand properly Jewish or Christian exegesis in late antiquity it is essential to understand each other's interpretations and the influence of one upon the other” (182). He begins by reviewing the shortcomings of previous approaches to Jewish–Christian interaction in late antiquity. Kessler then puts forward what he terms the exegetical approach, suggests some controls on this method, and proceeds to test his hypothesis by conducting a verse-by-verse examination of Genesis 22. In each chapter, he first surveys a few major early interpreters, such as Philo and Josephus, and then compares Rabbinic and early Christian interpretations on Genesis 22 in some detail. There is also a final chapter that examines ancient artistic renderings of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac.

Cynthia Baker's Rebuilding the House of Israel is one of a handful of studies that seek to interpret Jewish culture during late antiquity by setting rabbinic sources and archaeological remains from the Land of Israel in dialogue. Baker is a careful and perceptive reader of both the primary tannaitic sources that she discusses and of the material record. In fact, the body of the book, in which she discusses the domestic context (well titled “The Well-Ordered Bayit: Bodies, Houses and Rabbis in the Ancient Galilee”) and the marketplace (“Men, Women and the Shuk: Cultural Currencies on the Open Market”) is a well-written description and analysis of the preserved evidence. Baker shows, for example, that rabbinic notions of privacy and the placement of windows within extant structures reflect similar interests. More important, she shows the ways that various spaces, both public and private, were used by ancient Jewish women, and how gender issues played out within environments constructed by Jewish men and women in Roman Palestine. The impetus for this study was not ultimately Rabbinic literature or archaeology, however. It is what Baker sees as a misconception in recent scholarship. Baker argues against a position whereby Jewish women in antiquity were starkly limited to the domestic realm, while the public realm (and even elements of the private) were reserved for men.

Three texts are scrutinized in this monograph: Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Alive son of Awake), the Epistle or philosophic “Recital” composed in Arabic prose by the Muslim sage ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037); Hayy ben Meqitz, the closely related Hebrew poem composed by the Andalusian Jewish sage Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164); and Hayy ibn Yaqzan, the more loosely related Arabic treatise composed by the Andalusian Muslim sage Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl (1116–1185). Each of the texts is well known to specialists in medieval intellectual history. Editions and critical discussions abound, almost all of them listed in the bibliography (pp. 245-65). The Arabic texts have long been accessible in reliable English translations. Thanks to Aaron W. Hughes, the same can now be said for ibn Ezra's less familiar narrative poem. In the appendix (pp. 189–207), the poem is rendered into English based on the original Hebrew text published in 1983 by Israel Levin. The translation is enhanced by references to the biblical idioms employed by ibn Ezra who ingeniously transformed ibn Sina's profoundly Islamic original into an equally stunning Hebrew gem.

About 35,000 books and articles have been published thus far on the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). The vast majority deal with the literature found in the eleven caves in the vicinity of Qumran and only a few deal with the archaeological remains of Khirbet Qumran nearby. The site was exhaustively excavated a few times in the past fifty-four years. The first that also determined the nature of its interpretation was carried out during 1951 to 1956 by Fr. Roland de Vaux from the French school of biblical studies at Jerusalem, the Ecole Biblique. Most of the site was unearthed during this excavation. The latest excavations were carried out in the past ten years and thus far with extremely meager publications.

Marc Shapiro puts an explicit contemporary context on this remarkable collection of sources that disagreed with one part or other of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles—the beliefs Maimonides asserted were absolutely necessary to be considered a believing Jew and to attain the World to Come. By showing the extent to which past authors disagreed with those Principles, Shapiro seeks to debunk assertions by contemporary writers that place those Principles at the core of Orthodox belief.

In this bold and ambitious book, Rachel Elior seeks to trace the early history of Jewish mysticism, from biblical through rabbinic times. In the course of ten chapters, the author covers a wide range of material, with special attention devoted to Ezekiel, 1 Enoch, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice, and of course the Hekhalot texts. While not all scholars will be convinced by the analysis presented here, one should welcome this latest installment in the author's wide-ranging and creative efforts to understand better the origins and later developments of Jewish mysticism.

Pinchas Giller is one of the finest contemporary scholars of the zoharic corpus. His current study, Reading the Zohar, constitutes an excellent sequel to his earlier book, The Enlightened Will Shine. The Zohar certainly warrants the kind of thoughtful and serious reflection that Giller devotes to it, insofar as the Zohar is a massive, complex corpus consisting of some two dozen distinct strata. In Enlightened, Giller examined major themes in Tikkunei Zohar and Raעayaء Mehemnaء. Although these are rich and interesting compositions, chronologically they are among the latest and were undoubtedly written by someone other than whoever was responsible for the foundational writings of the Zohar. In Reading the Zohar, Giller is primarily concerned with three seminal aspects of the zoharic corpus: Sabaءde-mishpatim, cosmogonic descriptions that are preserved in various strata, and the four interconnected עIdrot texts. On its own, an analysis of such disparate and challenging sources would be an admirable undertaking. What makes Giller's study even more ambitious is that he also examines how these particular works were studied and interpreted. In particular, Giller is interested in how the kabbalists of Safed, most notably R. Moses Cordovero and R. Isaac Luria, incorporated these zoharic texts into their distinctive theosophical systems.

Jewish mystical and magical texts are remarkably relevant to some of the most central historiographical themes of early modern Europe; they are also remarkably esoteric and confounding to any nonspecialist. Providing a remedy to this incongruity, J. H. Chajes makes a major contribution to both Jewish and general early modern historiography with his first book, on Jewish spirit possession and exorcism. His work offers a useful narrative of the development of Jewish exorcism traditions, presenting the complex subject in terms that make it more approachable without over-simplification. At the same time, Chajes lends the material depth and relevance through sensitive analysis of the chronologically and geographically local circumstances of the most significant early modern treatments of the phenomenon. The appendix alone would be an offering of some significance, consisting of eleven original translations of early modern accounts of spirit possession, and this quality of presenting important raw material runs throughout the volume. Competent and detailed legwork is evident in the exposition of various exorcists' techniques from the ancient world and Middle Ages, through Luria's unique methods in sixteenth-century Safed, and up to later seventeenth-century attitudes to possession and demonology. Much of this material is in the first chapter, “The Emergence of Dybbuk Possession,” which argues that “there was something new in the sixteenth century” as a long percolation of diverse traditions culminated in the formation of the “classic” view of the dybbuk in a period of unprecedented frequency of possession and exorcism events.

German Jewish communities underwent momentous changes in status, composition, and character during the fifteenth century, yet apart from its intellectual legacy, this period has merited scant attention from historians. Even contemporaries viewed the post-plague German communities as a diminished and spent shadow of their vital medieval Ashkenazic predecessors, and historiography has maintained this perception. Scholars characterized the period as one of intellectual decline, population shrinkage and expulsion from the remaining cities that had not destroyed or expelled their Jewish communities during the bubonic plague depredations. Despite the real devastation caused by the fourteenth-century chaos, much vibrant life remained within German Jewish communities. Little has been written, particularly in English, concerning the reasons for subsequent Christian resistance to the presence of Jews and the effects of new Christian conceptions of their own communities on Jewish self-perception. Bell's book intends to fill this gap. Neither a social history, nor an intellectual history of fifteenth-century Germans and Jews, it is a pioneering attempt to track the changing definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in the fifteenth century. It is an ambitious enterprise.

Jehiel Jacob Weinberg was, and remains, one of the outstanding figures of Modern Orthodoxy, along with David Zvi Hoffmann, Isaac Herzog, and Joseph B. Soloveitchik. Shapiro's exemplary biography marks the onset of a new stage in biographical scholarship about leading Orthodox personalities, moving beyond the hagiographies (which brought the figures to attention while affirming the Orthodox community) and the pioneer studies of Aharon Sorasky and Aharon Rakeffet-Rothkoff, and is a mandate for Judaic scholars to study the other greats (including the Hofets Hayim, Hayim Hirschensohn, Meir Shapiro of Lublin, Nathan Birnbaum, Hayim Ozer Grodzensky and Jakob Rosenheim). This book tells us what it takes to be a pathfinder in the world of twentieth-century Orthodox Judaism: the courage to carry a Hegelian-like dialectic about religious options to conclusion in a world of societal turmoil and historical trauma. As Weinberg moved from Slobodka to Pilwishki (Lithuania), to Giessen, Berlin, and then through the Warsaw ghetto, detention camp in Wülzburg, and finally to Montreux, he existentialized the struggle between the isolated talmudic culture of Eastern Europe and the Talmud cum secular culture of the West and its synthetic conclusion.

Christopher Browning is perhaps most widely known for his seminal study of the motives of the “ordinary men” who perpetrated the systematic murder of European Jewry at the behest of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, in the past two decades he has devoted much of his attention to studying the processes and decisions that led the Reich to make systematic mass murder its official policy and to provide the impetus and means for its implementation. Now he has brought his empirical findings and interpretations together in a single volume that provides the most rigorous, cogent, and lucid analysis currently available of this crucial problem in the history of the encounter between Nazi Germany and the Jews.

This book searchingly reexamines and sheds much new light on subjects that might already seem to have received more than enough scholarly attention. Ronald Schechter succeeds in offering an intriguing new account of the attitude of the thinkers of the French Enlightenment, some of their heirs, and some of their enemies toward the Jews. He also presents a challenging, if less than fully convincing, interpretation of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French Jews' response to what was being said about them and what was happening to them.

Immediately following his acknowledgments, Cohen begins his volume with an invitation that aims to evoke our interest in the Jews of St. Thomas. This chapter structure—in which the volume commences with what is in essence a justification for its publication—elicits an intriguing question about the study of Jewish life. Cohen is asking us to consider why one should be interested in this (and by implication, any?) small community of Jews. His subsequent introductory chapter poses a second fundamental question. It asks whether, in an age in which prevailing historical models have been subject to critical reexamination, a history that is organized by chronology rather than by theme can have scholarly value. The core of his response to these questions is that the St. Thomas Jewish community is an unusual instance of “accumulative ethnicity” (xxii) and thus constitutes a pattern in Jewish ethnicity worthy of scholarly attention. The narrative is arranged in chronological sequence to convey this pattern. Its unfolding temporal structure allows the reader to watch Jewish ethnicities emerge both from, and in place of one another. In raising these questions, Cohen brings a reflexive stance to the narrative. Yet, socially constructed memory seems to lie at the heart of the notion of accumulative ethnicity. Most Jews currently living on St. Thomas are transplants from the American mainland. Might the volume's framework also represent an American search for roots, and for roots that are special?

In his epilogue to The Politics of Canonicity, Michael Gluzman has aptly delineated the parameters of this book, by writing that it “originates from the American debate on canon formation and cultural wars that predominated academic discourse during my years at University of California, Berkeley” (p. 181). This statement firmly sets its author within a critical context that auspiciously brings a wider literary discourse, such as that sustained by Chana Kronfeld and Hannan Hever, into the realm of modern Hebrew poetry. In particular, The Politics of Canonicity is identified by its publication in the series entitled Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences, which has a primary interest in the ongoing redefinition of Jewish identity and culture, specifically involving issues of gender, modernity, and politics. The Politics of Canonicity is effectively divided into two parts. In the first, comprising Chapters 1 and 2, Gluzman provides the intellectual and historical context for the interwoven formation of national identity and the literary canon in modern Hebrew literature. In particular, in Chapter 1 he relates the story of the 1896–1897 debate between Ahad Ha'am and Mikha Yosef Berdichevsky, arguing that it produced a dominant and regulative paradigm of Hebrew literature that integrates the private and public, the aesthetic and the national. In the second chapter, Gluzman discusses the way in which Hebrew modernism created a counterpoint to international modernism's glorification of exile. He discusses a full range of premodernist and modernist Hebrew poets—Shaul Tchernichovsky, Avigdor Hameiri, Avraham Shlonsky, Noach Stern, and Leah Goldberg—in order to underline their resistance to “the idea of exile as a literary privilege or as an inherently Jewish vocation” (p. 37), a resistance which Gluzman determines as calling into question “the critical tendency to read modernist practices as essentially antinationalist” (p. 37).

In the early modern and modern periods, the occupational profile of Jews in the West diverged dramatically from that of their neighbors and fellow citizens. Commerce, rather than agriculture or artisanal or industrial manufacturing, provided the arena in which Jews labored to make a living. From an economic perspective, this was not a problem. It did not place Jews at a competitive disadvantage. Indeed, the opposite was true. In the context of industrialization, urbanization, and mass consumption, buying and selling was more profitable than tolling in a field, workshop, or factory. Having been forced into a narrow range of occupations earlier in their history, Jews in the West now found themselves in an advantageous position economically. However, for Gentiles, who rarely viewed Jews in a disinterested light, the Jewish distinctive occupational profile was problematic and often viewed as symptomatic of a more profound pathology. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with Jews becoming citizens of the states in which they lived and moving rapidly into the middle class, their economic distinctiveness became a central feature of the debate about their fate and future, what was known at the time as the “Jewish Question.”

In his Kabbalah: New Perspectives, Moshe Idel envisioned a reordering of scholarly inquiry into Kabbalah, in which the intellectual divisions between the world of the traditional kabbalists and academic scholars would be bridged. The writings of Moshe Halamish, while not conceived with the specific purpose of fulfilling such a mandate, nonetheless create a realm of discourse in which traditional models are, at least, not outraged. Halamish writes in such a way that a dialogue with the traditional purveyors of Kabbalah may be at least envisioned.

The subtitle tells it all: the book is not about bioethics, business ethics or communal ethics, but about the kind of ethics one should establish for one's personal life. Starting with issues of privacy, the book moves us through sexual ethics, relationships within families, forgiveness, and finally, hope. Although traditional Jewish sources are mined for their insights, in the end, this is one person's notion about what Jewish ethics can (and should) say about issues of personal ethics. Dorff acknowledges this right in his preface, “throughout the book, I present what I take to be an authentic reading and application of the Jewish tradition but surely not the only one. I therefore take care to use judgment [emphasis in the original] in assessing how the tradition should be best applied to modern circumstance, by providing arguments from the tradition and from modern sources and circumstance to justify [emphasis in the original] my reading of the tradition and arguing against alternative readings” (p. xii). In short, the book is not descriptive of the Jewish tradition but prescriptive, laying out how one should think about these issues as a modern American Jew who wants to think “Jewishly.”