A bit more than a quarter of a century has passed since the publication of Thomas Thompson's landmark The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives, inaugurating what has been called the Copenhagen School, typified by the works of Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, who now both teach at the University of Copenhagen. Few works have changed the face of biblical scholarship so completely. In conjunction with John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition, Thompson's book sounded the death knell for those who insisted on the historicity of the patriarchal period, a relatively common position up to that point, especially in America. By illustrating that details of the Genesis narratives reflect first rather than second millennium institutions, contrary to the claims of Albright, Gordon, Speiser, and others, Thompson began a revolution in biblical scholarship.

Pierre Hadot's formulation of “spiritual exercise” has had a tremendous influence upon the study of philosophy and religion in Late Antiquity and beyond. He argues that the well-known exercises of Ignatius of Loyola are part of an older and broader tradition that has its roots in Greco-Roman and Hellenistic schools of philosophy, and that much of ancient and late ancient philosophical speculation should be analyzed as deeply intertwined with practical goals for self-transformation. His research centers upon the Greek askēsis and meletē, which he translates as “spiritual exercise,” as well as the Latin exercitium spirituale. However, his study goes beyond occurrences of those particular terms, and he aims to develop a category that can be used in comparative and theoretical reflection.Hadot's studies of spiritual exercises run through his works, including Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision. Michael Chase, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Philosophy as a Way of Life Arnold Davidson, ed., Michael Chase, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995), esp. pp. 81–144; and The Inner Citadel, Michael Chase, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). An important predecessor is Paul Rabbow, Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike (Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1954).

Explicit rabbinic legal concepts and principles—notions such as “multiple causation is prohibited/permitted” (zeh ve-zeh gorem muttar/ءasur), “retrospective determination of reality is/is not valid” (yesh/ءein bererah), and the like—occur frequently in the Babylonian Talmud (BT), especially in the later strata of that work.See generally Leib Moscovitz, Talmudic Reasoning: From Casuistics to Conceptualization (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), especially pp. 292–342, with extensive references to earlier literature. Most concepts and principles of this sort are applied to a case or two, although we sometimes find extended conceptual sugyot in BT that systematically analyze a particular legal principle. Such passages generally analyze a group of tannaitic sources in light of the specified principle, which is assumed to apply to all the cases cited; these cases may be adduced either to support or to refute the relevant principle.

Literary and historical evidence of religious disputes that took place between Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages exists in a variety of sources. Hebrew manuscripts and Latin documents concerning such encounters survive from the disputations that were held in Paris (1240), Barcelona (1263), and Tortosa (1413–1414). Some of these were written by participants themselves after the events described. Some were produced by Christian authors as protocols, either during or after the disputations. Significant discrepancies concerning the same dispute are to be found between the Christian and Jewish accounts.See Y. Baer, “Towards a Critique of the Disputes Between Rabbi Yeḥiel of Paris and Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman,” (Hebrew) Tarbiz, 2 (1931), pp. 172-187; Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), II, pp. 176-181; Ḥ. Merḥavia, The Talmud in the Eyes of Christianity: the View of Post-Biblical Jewish Literature in the Medieval Christian World, 500–1248 (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1970), pp. 227–348; R. Chazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and its Aftermath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 1–80; J. Riera I Sans, La Crònica en Hebreu de la Disputa de Tortosa (Barcelona: Fundacio Salvador Vives Casajuana, 1974). Other material on this subject exists in the literature of the Christian Adversus Iudaeos (dating from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages) and in the Jewish polemical literature (dating from the twelfth century). Pioneer studies have also recently appeared using the records of the Spanish Inquisition, in which much evidence was found concerning such disputes.See E. Gutwirth, “Gender, History and the Judeo-Christian Polemic,” in O. Limor and G. G. Stroumsa, eds., Contra Judaeos (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1996), pp. 257–278.

Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (1800–1853) has been described as “the most radical of the Jewish mystics” and as a religious anarchist.Joseph Weiss, “A Late Jewish Utopia of Religious Freedom,” in David Goldstein, ed., Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 211. Along similar lines, see Rivka Schatz, “Autonomy of the Spirit and the Law of Moses” (Hebrew), Molad 21 (1973–1974), pp. 554–561 and Rachel Elior, “The Innovations in Polish Hasidism” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 62 (1993), pp. 381- 432. This position has already been moderated to some extent in Morris M. Faierstein, All is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (New York: Ktav, 1989). Other works on R. Mordecai Joseph include Jerome Gellman, Fear and Trembling, and the Fire (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1994) and Shaul Magid, “Hasidism and Existentialism? A Review Essay,” Modern Judaism 15 (1995) pp. 279–294. Some scholars have wondered how he managed to resist the antinomian pull of his own doctrine, and to “suffer the chaotic without perishing within it.”Weiss, A Late Jewish Utopia, p. 245. Yet this characterization bears witness to a profound tendency in much of the academic scholarship on Hasidism—and on religion in general—to privilege doctrine over practice, or to frame the object of study in theological and philosophical rather than ritual and hermeneutic terms.See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Byron J. Good, Medicine, Rationality and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), each of which treats the difficulty associated with “belief” as an analytic category in the study of culture and religion. Moshe Idel's Hasidism Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) provides a welcome correction to the doctrinal focus in Hasidic studies, but the specific ritual models he describes (i.e. ecstasy and magic) are inadequate to R. Mordecai Joseph's oeuvre. It neglects, for instance, the fact that Hasidic texts are often devoted to the elaboration of ritual cosmologies, and that ritual “work” (including the management of emotional dispositions) almost always takes place over time. As the anthropologist Victor Turner has shown, this means that ritual symbols can take on different or even contradictory sets of meanings depending on where in an ongoing ritual process they are deployed.Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967). An influential statement on the role of ritual in promoting religious dispositions can be found in Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). For a critique of Geertz with special reference to Hasidic sources, see Don Seeman, “Ritual, Emotion and ‘Useless Suffering' in the Warsaw Ghetto” (in press). When R. Mordecai Joseph makes seemingly contradictory statements about the existence of free will or the place of anger in religious experience therefore, it is in ritual process rather than anarchy or inconsistency that an explanation should be sought. He was moved by a distinctive understanding of divine glory (kabod shamayim) to reevaluate ritual strategies that promoted ecstasy, emotionalism, and self-annihilation or martyrdom as religious ideals in Hasidism, and to suggest new forms of ritual work in their stead. In short, R. Mordecai Joseph sought to reconcile divine glory with divine law, and to do so at the level of the individual human will.

The second Aliyah brought a large number of Hebrew authors to Palestine, some of them among the greatest Hebrew writers of all time.U. N. Gnessin (1907), David Shimoni (1909), S. Y.Agnon (1907), Y. H. Brenner (1909), and Dvora Baron (1911). Those who remained endured the privations of the First World War, which became particularly severe throughout its final year, but few of them wrote about it. In fact, within the large corpus of belletristic writing in Hebrew and Yiddish at the time, there is little devoted to the Jewish experience in the First World War. Many critics and scholars of the period, in addition to later commentators, affirmed (and some lamented) that the output of Jewish war writing was modest in Yiddish as well as Hebrew.See Avner Holtzman, Avigdor Hameiri vesifrut hamilḥamah. Maעarakhot, 1986, p. 33; Ḥanan Ḥever, ed., U.Z Greenberg: taעarukhah bamilءat shemonim. Jerusalem: Beit hasefarim haleءumi vehaءuniversitaءi, 1977, p.17. Nonetheless there exists a substantial body of such work about which little is known to this day. At the time, it seems, Hebrew literature had to serve greater aims than the individual responses of soldiers in a foreign war soon after the Balfour Declaration. The most powerful responses were, with some notable exceptions,Notably, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Tchernichowski, and Hameiri and their works written some time after the events or by writers, such as Y. H. Brenner, who were not combatants but were victimized by the war nonetheless.

Mary Douglas. Leviticus as Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xv, 280 pp; Hyam Maccoby. Ritual and Morality: The Ritual Purity System and Its Place in Judaism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii, 231 pp.

These are good times for those who are fascinated by the book of Leviticus. While denigrations of the Israelite purity system and priestly traditions are still to be found, there seems to be an increasing willingness to give Leviticus the benefit of some doubt, considering it to be something other than a dry, rigid, ritualistic, and hierarchical code. These two books argue forcefully, convincingly—and quite differently—against many previous misunderstandings of Leviticus. What is more, we can perhaps even begin to speak of an emerging consensus on one important issue that both books deal with: the nature of ritual impurity. More and more scholars seem to be saying what these two are: that ritual impurity is a complex ritual structure, not a blunt instrument of social control. But if the evaluation of Leviticus in general (and ritual impurity in particular) is positive in both of these books, they share little else. It is difficult to conceive of two scholarly books with as many overlapping concerns, published in the same year and country, which differ so much with regard to scope, structure, and method. They differ too, in the end, with regard to both quality and importance.

Some time in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the maskil (enlightened Jew) Joseph Perl (1773–1839) appealed to the provincial authorities in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia to support those in the Jewish community who strove to find a solution to the rabbinic requirement that a male convert to Christianity grant his Jewish wife a writ of divorce (get).Contested divorces where the husband had converted to Christianity were particularly poignant for Ashkenazic Jewry living in medieval and early modern western Christendom because of the paradox inherent in the halakhic requirement for a male Jewish apostate to grant his wife a Jewish divorce. The apostate was viewed as both immutably Jewish, always a potential baעal teshuvah, to the Jewish community, and immutably Christian to the Church because the waters of baptism were indelible. Jewish jurists, well aware of their community's susceptibility to conversionary pressures, struggled between keeping the doors of repentance open and making an example of the convert by meting out harsh punishments against him. See Rashi's famous responsum regarding the marital status of women whose husbands had been forcibly converted during the Crusades, cited in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (Atheneum, 1938), pp. 301–302; and the discussion in Jacob Katz, “Though He Has Sinned, He Remains an Israelite,” Tarbiz 27 (1958): pp. 203–217. For the early modern period, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 25, 138–139. Perl's treatise, with the bold title, Über die Modifikation der Mosaischen Gesetze (Regarding the Modification of Mosaic Laws),Joseph Perl Archive, folder 144, JNULA. Written primarily in Gothic German, with occasional use of Latin characters and Hebrew citations, the manuscript is 83 pages with an introduction. The only mention I have found of the text is by Avraham Rubinstein, who noted that the manuscript was indicated in Philip Koffler's appendix to the Perl archive. See [Joseph Perl] Über das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim, Avraham Rubinstein, ed. (Jerusalem, 1977), p. 4, n. 17. See, too, Joseph Perl Archive, folder 131, “Comments or corrections to the book dealing with Jewish Law,” and folder 38.7075. did not urge the abandonment of rabbinic law or authority. Rather, he argued that a historical investigation of Jewish divorce law proved that minimizing the possibility of ‘aginut (“grass widowhood”) had always been a priority of a responsible rabbinic leadership. Were the Austrians able to empower an upstanding contemporary rabbinate sensitive to women's needs, Perl reasoned, a rabbinically-sanctioned halakhic solution to the problem of an ‘agunah married to a convert could be found. Although the Austrian censor rejected the publication of Über die Modifikation der Mosaischen Gesetze, the manuscript is illustrative of the ideological concerns of moderate maskilim in Central and Eastern Europe who wanted to participate fully in civil society while retaining the authority of Jewish law.The censor rejected the manuscript on February 17, 1831. See number 6 in the list of manuscripts compiled as an appendix to Perl's Archives by Philip Koffler of Tarnopol during the interwar years, Joseph Perl Archive, JNULA, appendix.

This work is an updated revision of Kalimi's Zur Geschichtsschreibung des Chronisten, published in 1995 in the BZAW series, which in turn is based on his Hebrew University dissertation. Kalimi begins by outlining his (mainstream) positions on central questions concerning Chronicles, such as its date, unity, and genre: issues that are crucial before developing his thesis. The bulk of the book comprises nineteen chapters, each dealing with a particular literary or historical principle, such as harmonization, measure for measure, chiasm, inclusio, and use of literary patterning. A final chapter deals with inconsistencies of various sorts, and an “Afterward” discusses how the book has advanced scholarship on Chronicles.

Informed by a common commitment to taking the reader “beyond the Pale,” new histories of Russian Jewry strike at the complex of images encapsulated in the single most important signifier of the Russian—Jewish condition. Between the partitions of Poland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the First World War, tsarist law restricted Jewish residence almost exclusively to the Pale of Jewish Settlement, an administrative unit that encompassed the Western borderlands of the empire. In Jewish memory, this confinement was not merely geographic but cultural and social; reference to the Pale evokes a sense of isolation from Russia proper inflicted from the outside by effective legal discrimination and buttressed from within by the force of tradition. The only way for Jews to leave the Pale presumably involved either emigrating or opting out of Judaism altogether. For some, conversion to Christianity relieved all of the burdens of communal authority and juridical disability associated with the Pale. For others, the turn to the universal faiths of the nineteenth century—Enlightenment, socialism, Marxism—constituted an analogous act of departure. The reduction of the Russian—Jewish experience to simple contrasts may be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that until a decade ago historians were forced to rely on anecdotal literary evidence; archival materials remained hidden behind the iron curtain. Four recent studies attribute their own historiographic departure from the pale directly to the availability of documentary sources that bring to light a variety of possibilities for defying the internal and external constraints of the Pale without abandoning one's Jewishness in the process.

This is an interesting, well-written and important study, relevant to anyone interested in better understanding metaphor in the Bible, figurative language, or idolatry. David Aaron, Professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, was trained in rabbinics and linguistics at Brandeis University; this training offers him a certain sensitivity to how language, especially what many would consider figurative language, functions. Thus, the book really deals with the importance of understanding semantics for interpretation.

Did the God of Israel have a wife? Posed in the context of monotheistic Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity this is, of course, a nonsensical question. However, even in the heavily edited Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible there remain traces of an earlier stage of belief in which Yahweh was accompanied by other beings. Among these para-human figures is Asherah, the form of whose name clearly indicates her feminine gender. In recent years numerous scholars have addressed the ticklish question of the original relationship between this lady and the Lord of Hosts, a problem that involves probing into the prehistory of the Hebrew scriptures.

The field of Aramaic studies has witnessed a steady stream of major developments in recent years. Important new volumes include M. Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Palestinian Jewish Aramaic (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1990); J. Hoftijzer and K. Jongeling, Dictionary of the North-West Semitic Inscriptions, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995); and T. Muraoka and B. Porten, A Grammar of Egyptian Aramaic (Leiden: Brill, 1998).1 Two classics have been reprinted by Eisenbrauns: J. Payne Smith, A Compendious Syriac Dictionary (Oxford, 1903; repr. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998); and T. Nöldeke, Compendious Syriac Grammar (London, 1904; repr. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001). In addition, the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon web site has been launched (http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/index.html), with various databases currently available and with the promise for more online resources.

In this very balanced and thought-provoking book, Shelly Matthews studies a series of Greek and Roman texts concerning Gentile women of high standing who were attracted to Judaism and Christianity. These texts, in particular Josephus' novelistic conversion and expulsion story in Antiquities 18.65–84, are well known and often discussed, but they have rarely been set into a wider framework. Matthews argues that Josephus, Luke, “and other religious apologists,” in recounting episodes of upper-class women's associations with their communities, followed a rhetorical strategy. These authors were anxious to depict their respective communities as compatible with Greco-Roman culture. The existence of pagan upper-class women supporting the Jewish cause could demonstrate such a compatibility. Matthews is well aware of the numerous derogatory statements by such authors as Tacitus and Plutarch, who criticize women's involvement in politics and religion. Jewish and Christian use of the sympathetic Gentile woman as an apologetic figure, one might think, could have a boomerang effect. Matthews tries to solve this problem by pointing out that women in Greco-Roman antiquity often played an active role in religious performances and that this role was often accepted. The narratives of Josephus and Luke thus reflect a historical phenomenon.

Fox's objective is “to refine current definitions of titles of royal functionaries and their roles in the monarchic state-organization and to create a tentative reconstruction of the government structure” (p. 269). Secondarily, she questions whether “Israelite officialdom and administrative practices were modeled after foreign prototypes” (p. 276f).

Since the publication of the first Qumran scrolls more than half a century ago, the schematic 364 day solar year of Jubilees has been posited as a major issue in the schism of the Qumran community from mainstream Judaism. Shemaryahu Talmon was among the pioneers in assessing the impact of this calendar upon the life of the Qumran community, as best illustrated by the Yom Kippur confrontation with the Wicked Priest who came to suppress the sect's observance of the fast on a date in conflict with the prevalent lunar calendar. Talmon's thesis is that the sect, like the author of Jubilees, viewed the observation of the moon as leading to corruption of the ideal 364 day calendar in which the holidays and all dates were perpetually fixed to particular days of the week. Whether and how the sect made correction for the annual deficit of one and one quarter days is not known, but presumably they had only disdain for the arbitrary methods of lunar intercalation.

The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years serves as a kind of handbook for the study of the synagogue in antiquity. It discusses every major site, every major text and most major issues and secondary sources. It is indeed a worthy successor to Samuel Krauss' Synagogale Altertümer (Berlin and Vienna), published in 1922. Comparison of this volume with that of Krauss shows the intention of each author to be inclusive of all that was known about the synagogue in an encyclopedic fashion. This comparison also shows how much more we know of the ancient synagogue than Krauss did. This is crudely expressed by sheer number of pages in each volume. While Krauss produced a book of 470 pages in length, Levine's magnum opus is a whopping 748 pages. Archaeological discoveries in Israel and the Mediterranean basin, as well as texts discovered or published (most significantly from the Cairo Genizah) have greatly increased our sources for the history of the synagogue. In addition, new methods for the study of ancient Judaism, its literature, and its material culture have facilitated a complete rethinking of the history of the synagogue.

In 1989, after the fall of the Iron Curtain in the former Soviet Union, Menahem Kahana of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem was the first Israeli scholar to search the St. Petersburg and Moscow libraries for manuscripts of rabbinic texts, and especially for lost halakhic midrashim. During his second visit, Kahana noticed that in a commentary on Deuteronomy written by a tenth-century Karaite sage named Yeshua ben Yehuda from Jerusalem, there were derashot to Deuteronomy that are unknown from any other rabbinic source. At first, he tentatively assumed that these quotations were from lost sections of the Mekhilta on Deuteronomy. However, the more Kahana culled quotations from the 30 (!) manuscripts of Yeshua's commentary, the more he realized that the terminological differences between these derashot and Mekhilta on Deuteronomy, coupled with the absence of these sources from Midrash Hagadol, which was familiar with Mekhilta on Deuteronomy, precluded such identification. In 1993, Kahana lectured on these derashot and identified them as belonging to a third tannaitic midrash on Deuteronomy (Sifre on Deuteronomy being the first), which he entitled Sifre Zuta Deuteronomy (SZD) based on its similarities to the already known Sifre Zuta Numbers (SZN).

This book is presented as “first a study of the classic rabbinic discourse on menstruation and of the range of meanings that talmudic literature accords to women's bodies in its discourse on Niddah” (p. 1). As the presence of the word “Christian” in the subtitle would suggest, however, the actual contents of the book are somewhat broader. The range of materials covered are all worthy of scholarly examination and analysis, which Fonrobert ably and engagingly provides. Yet, the wide reach of this book contributes to both its strengths and its weaknesses.

The Battles of Armageddon is a meticulous chronicle of the dozens of military clashes over the centuries that have given an aura of apocalyptic expectation to a small patch of valley in northern Israel. Television-evangelists and Bible-thumpers all over the world continue to whip up their followers with nightmarish visions of nuclear disaster and divine judgment linked to the ominous word “Armageddon.” But for those who care to dig a little deeper, Eric H. Cline of The George Washington University masterfully shows us that a long, violent, and tangled history lies behind that name. Cline systematically reveals the millennium-long steps by which certain arbitrary topographic realities, unchanging military technologies, and the relative geographical positions of the great Near Eastern empires made the site of Megiddo—and indeed all of the Jezreel Valley—a tragically tiresome cockpit of war.