In a fascinating chapter dealing with the “nature of eating” in Shulhan shel Arba, a short thirteenth-century manual on rabbinic eating rituals, R. Bahya b. Asher suggests that Torah scholars alone are fit to eat meat, based on the following passage from the Talmud: “it is forbidden for an ignoramus [am ha-aretz] to eat meat, as it is written, ‘This is the torah of beast and fowl’ (Lev 11:46); for all who engage in Torah, it is permitted to eat the flesh of beast and fowl. This passage raises many questions, especially for a vegetarian! First, why would an intellectual or spiritual elite use meat-eating as a way to distinguish itself from the masses? The field of comparative religions offers many counter-examples to this tendency: the vegetarian diet of the Hindu Brahmin caste, of Buddhist priests and nuns, the ancient Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonist regimen advocated by Porphyry in On Abstinence, or even contemporary eco-theologians, animal rights activists, and feminist vegetarians like Carol Adams.

In rabbinical literature the belief in a postmortem existence is rather obvious. Related terminology is relatively abundant, although fluid and obscure at times. The use of this terminology by a diversity of Jewish sources further complicates the understanding of the enigmatic notion called afterlife.

The purpose of this article is to explore one aspect of the Jewish credo of the afterlife: the nature of divine recompense in relation to martyrdom. The article aims at determining when a relationship between voluntary death and divine recompense was first established and what the nature of this recompense was. While this relationship does not contain answers to every question regarding Jewish tenets on the afterlife, I believe it to be indicative of general Jewish attitudes toward life and death in various periods and Jewries.

Samuel ibn Tibbon (died ca. 1232) is best known as the translator of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. But as Aviezer Ravitzky has shown in his doctoral dissertation and in a series of recent articles, ibn Tibbon was an important thinker in his own right. First and foremost, ibn Tibbon appears to have been the earliest significant interpreter of Maimonides' philosophical thought. He was also one of the most influential. While there had been suspicions, even during his lifetime, that Maimonides held radical esoteric philosophical views, ibn Tibbon was the first to lend sophistication to this viewpoint by developing an elaborate system of interpretation for unlocking the secrets of the Guide, one that would have a significant impact on subsequent interpreters of Maimonides.

Death, the space of death, the moment when one as mourner or passerby comes into the orbit of the dead, engaging the face of the dead, is one of the defining moments of the human experience. Understanding the cultural construction of that space promises to shed light on some of the central questions of the culture.

Rabbinical appointments in modern times have been the subject of some study: in Ashkenaz it was customary for a son to inherit the office of rabbi from his father, provided he was deserving. Simḥa Assaf writes: “We do not find [in earlier periods] the practice which is widespread today, whereby a community, upon the death of its rabbi, appoints his son or son-in-law even if they are unworthy replacements. Previously, communities were not subject to this ‘dynastic imposition.’” Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, in the seventeenth century, there are attestations of the rabbinical office becoming a dynasty reserved for certain families, notably Ṭayṭaṣaq, Ṣarfati and ‘Arameh, in Saloniki.Although the rabbinate was not perceived as the rightful monopoly of any particular family, interviews conducted with rabbis and community leaders on this point indicate that certain families had clearly been preferred over others. From the seventeenth century onwards this grew more pronounced: occasionally, the community would refrain from appointing a new rabbi and wait for a younger son to reach maturity so he could inherit his father's position.

The poet Haim Gouri is a central figure among the artists of the generation of the War of Independence and one of the first Israeli poets and novelists to express experience of the Holocaust. Gouri, who was bom in Tel Aviv in 1922, was sent to Europe in 1947 to smuggle Jewish Holocaust survivors into Palestine. Subsequently, he served in the Palmach and fought in the battles in the Negev in 1948. He attests that his encounter with the survivors of the Nazi camps changed his life, and that the experience became an obsessive theme throughout his work. This article focuses on two complementary subjects: (1) Gouri's perception of Jewish history and the effect of his encounter with Holocaust survivors in the formulation of his autobiography; (2) the concrete shaping of the experience of this encounter in his first three books of poetry, Pirhey esh, 'Ad 'alot ha-shahar, and Shirey hotam,1 and in his autobiographical novel Ha-haqira, sippuro shel Re 'u 'el?