The emergence of modern Hebrew literature has too often been represented as a straight line from Enlightenment authors' meliẓa to “Mendele's nusaḥ” in S. Y. Abramovitsh's fiction. If we are to move beyond this one-dimensional geometry, we must add additional lines of development: from traditional rabbinic writing in postmishnaic Hebrew, branching out to hasidic narratives and parodies of hasidic Hebrew, and gradually leading toward a more vernacular Hebrew style. Once we have recognized the inadequacy of the older model, which culminates in hyperbolic claims for Abramovitsh's short stories (1886–96), we can better appreciate the contributions of diverse authors such as R. Nathan (Nosn) Sternharz (1780–1845), Mendel Lefin (1749–1826), and their successors.

The past few years have witnessed an expansion of the range of sources that Talmudists regularly employ in their research on the Bavli. Scholars now turn to Iranian epic and folk literature; to Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and Eastern Christian ritual and theological writings; to Sasanian civil law; and to other nonrabbinic sources in an effort to broaden and deepen their understanding of the Bavli and its place in the “splendid confusion” that was Sasanian Mesopotamian society. As Yaakov Elman has pointed out, this research trend serves as a corrective for more than half a century of scholarly neglect, which was only encouraged by a dearth of critical editions of Middle Persian literature and more general studies of Sasanian culture and religions. Now, following a steady output of some long-anticipated editions, and, more significantly, as a result of recent collaboration between Talmudists and Iranists, the coming years hold great promise for a radically new understanding of the Bavli and its world.

Franz Kafka's short story “Schakale und Araber” (Jackals and Arabs) was published in October 1917 in the monthly journal Der Jude, the intellectual organ of German-speaking Zionism founded and edited by Martin Buber. The narrator, an unidentified and pleasant-mannered European man traveling in the desert, makes a stop at an oasis in an Arab area. The circumstances of his journey and its objectives are unknown. It becomes apparent from his story that the man has come to the Arab desert merely by chance “from the far North,” and that he has no intention of remaining in the area for long. All of a sudden, shortly after his “tall [and] white” Arab host has retired to the sleeping area, the narrator finds himself completely surrounded by a pack of jackals. One of them, who introduces himself as “the oldest jackal far and wide,” approaches the man and implores him to solve once and for all the long-standing dispute between the jackals and the Arabs, as the traveler alone—a man hailing from those countries in which reason reigns supreme, which is not the case among the Arabs—is capable of doing so. Once the jackal elder has related to the European traveler the story of his tribe's tribulations, and how they have been compelled to reside alongside the “filthy Arabs” from one generation to the next, another jackal produces a pair of scissors, which, according to the jackals' ancient belief, is to serve the long-awaited man of reason “from the North” to rescue them from their abhorrent and hated neighbors. But at that moment, the Arab caravan leader appears, wielding an immense whip. The reader learns that not only was the Arab awake while the jackal elder sought to persuade the European man to undertake the salvation project and listening attentively to the jackal's words, but in fact, he has been well aware of the jackals' intentions for a long time:

Students of poverty in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim social, literary, and legal contexts in late antiquity and the Middle Ages have noted the phenomenon of wealthy people who fall into poverty and the provision of charitable assistance to them. This essay's principal purpose is to point out an important difference between the development of attitudes toward the formerly wealthy poor in rabbinic literature of late antiquity and in other religious and legal contexts. Peter Brown notes evidence of late Roman empathy for the wellborn poor, hypothesizing that this empathy can be attributed to a desire to preserve these remnants of the old, proud plebs romana in the uncertain sixth century. Ingrid Mattson demonstrates that between the eighth and tenth or eleventh centuries CE, Islamic jurists moved in the direction of taking the “social and economic context” of a poor person into account in determining that person's legitimate needs. By contrast, as this essay will show, rabbinic literature of late antiquity moved in the opposite direction, from third-century empathy for the formerly wealthy poor to growing ambivalence in the fourth through the seventh centuries.

Not otherwise known as a bright era for the Jews of Christian Europe, the late fourteenth century nonetheless counted a number of thriving Jewish medical careers. One physician who surfaced in this period was Jacob b. Solomon of Avignon (sometimes called Jacob b. Solomon haTzarfati), whose career has been documented in two cities. In northern France, the land of his ancestors, we find him in the 1370s in the orbit of the University of Paris and its prestigious medical faculty. By the early 1380s, however, Jacob was at the papal court in Avignon, where or near where he was raised. There, in his own day at least, he achieved some renown while serving as physician to Pope Clement VII's brother, Count Pierre of Geneva.

During the past decade or so, there has been a “veritable boom … of projects that investigate questions of place and space” in Jewish studies. In this arena, scholars in various fields of Jewish studies have begun to engage with developments in the humanities at large. Since the 1980s, many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have become more attentive to the cultural challenges of globalization, prominent among them the effects of increased movements of migration. From these movements have arisen questions about the effect and meaning of uprooting and dislocation, the significance of belonging to a place (or to various places), the emergence of diaspora communities, and so on. The spatial dimension of human existence began to move to the forefront of scholarly considerations, and with it, new names of fields of study, such as human, critical, or cultural geography. While Jewish studies has, of course, for the longest time been aware of “diaspora” as a dimension of human existence, often perhaps with the understanding that diaspora was historically a uniquely Jewish experience, to a certain degree our field remained caught in the binarism of diaspora versus nationalism or Zionism, at least until the advance of this new impulse in the humanities, identified by some as a “spatial turn.” Against such binarisms, the volumes under discussion repeatedly appeal to “multidimensionality” in Jewish topographies and in our approaches to them.