Halakhah does not develop in a vacuum. It grows through its confrontation with the changing conditions in which Jews live. New situations raise new questions which, in turn, require new answers.

In the past few years, a number of works have appeared which have tried to utilize different methods in the analysis of midrashic and aggadic texts. These recent efforts include the application of literary structural analysis, formula comparison, linguistic tools, and form and redaction criticism, in addition to concern for the sitz im leben of particular passages, i.e., sociohistorical studies.

Jewish political traditions, it has been argued, constitute an integral facet of Jewish civilization in its entirety. They reflect a constant — albeit often implicit — understanding that the validity of Jewish teaching can best find expression in a political setting. They also embody Judaism's commitment to the establishment of the perfect polity. As implemented through the process of covenant (brit), and as buttressed by the attribute of loving-kindness (ḥesed), political traditions in effect comprise the vehicles whereby the Congregation of Israel attempts to transpose the kingdom of heaven (malkhut shamayim —“the good commonwealth”) to earth.

Questions regarding the human intellect haunted Averroes throughout his philosophic career; no less than seven of his preserved works treat the human intellect formally, while others, naturally enough, also do so incidentally. Here I shall point out that the seven aforementioned works fall into a sequence, that a recently published text of Averroes' has its place within the sequence, and that Moses Narboni misread Averroes for reasons to be explained.

The old political adage that every people gets the leaders it deserves may be recast in a broader, more positive, and ultimately truer sense to state that every society seeks (though it does not necessarily find) the kind of leadership that best embodies its values and aspirations. Thus much can be learned about a society by examining the relative standing of competing claimants for its leadership. This is particularly so in the wake of great transitions, when such standing may be expected to reflect specific intention, rather than the social inertia that predominates in calmer times.

R. Moses the Preacher in eleventh-century Narbonne was the compiler of an early example of the genre of biblical commentary to which the later Yalqut Shim'oni belongs, the anthology drawn from a wide range of rabbinic sources. Bereshit Rabbati (henceforth, BR), Midrash Aggadah, and Bemidbar Rabbah to Bemidbar and Naso are the surviving remnants of this work.

In February 1912 Arthur Hantke, a member of the Engeres Aktions- Comite (EAC or SAC), asked Chaim Weizmann to undertake a propaganda tour in the United States.1 Weizmann refused, but did agree to a shorter tour to European cities during the university semester break in March. In explaining his reasons for traveling only to Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and Heidelberg,2 Weizmann revealed some of his plans for the future:

As you know, I want to go to Palestine in 3–4 years. But I want to go to Palestine not when I have nothing to lose here, but on the contrary after having achieved everything here. This “everything” consists of two things: a full professorship and admission to the Royal Society. The former has been achieved except for the official announcement, which will presumably come during the summer term [sic]. The second is somewhat more difficult for a Russian Jew. However, the matter has got to the point where my candidature has been established. How long the candidature will “stand” depends on the scope and character of my scientific work, for in my case this is the only decisive criterion. I must therefore strain every nerve to work and publish a great deal, for admission to the Royal Society will open all doors for me here. I shall then be worth ten times as much to you….

In her book, Transparent Minds, Dorrit Cohn reminds us that one of the special powers of fiction lies in its ability to reveal the normally hidden inner life of people other than ourselves. Writers of fiction can, if it fits their purposes, place before our scrutiny the most intimate and private thoughts, feelings, motives, fears, and passions of their imagined characters, and can do so with a variety of techniques which, especially in twentieth-century fiction, take account of the complex, overdetermined, and largely unconscious processes of the human psyche. In modern Hebrew literature, no novelist has exploited this aspect of fiction with more passion and technical inventiveness than Y. H. Brenner. From the very outset of his career, Brenner's ability to make transparent the minds of his characters drew special attention and praise. Responding to his first collection of short stories, M. Y. Berdyczewski, for example, marveled that Brenner's characters had only to speak and they “stand before us naked, revealing all that is within.” And even Bialik, who was troubled by Brenner's fiction on other grounds, had to admit his impatience with literary theories when, as he put it, he was able to “see a living soul.”

Roman Jakobson's now classic distinction between metaphor and metonymy defines two primary modes of linguistic thought: on the one hand relations of similarity and dissimilarity, and on the other relations of contiguity or, we might say, dependence and independence. Though they find their most condensed expression in the tropes metaphor and metonymy, these same principles govern phonemic, lexical, and phraseological levels of language, and they operate as well in larger segments of discourse. A piece of fiction or poetry, for example, may develop along lines of association by likeness or through links of sequence and consequence.

National myths and public policies in Israel long assumed that the country's diverse Jewish immigrant groups would all eventually, and indeed within a short span of time, be absorbed and fused into a unified social, economic, political, and cultural entity, but this expectation is now giving way to widespread doubts as to its feasibility. Some of these doubts were expressed during the 1970s in a series of studies which demonstrated not only that there were still gaps between Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African extraction (often called Sephardim or Oriental Jews) and those of European extraction (Ashkenazim), as regards occupational and residential mobility, income and educational achievements, political representation and social prestige, but that the gaps were widening.1 The growing disillusionment on the part of Middle Eastern Jews (North Africans included) was dramatically revealed in the 1981 general elections by the emergence of a new ethnic party, Tami, which seemed to have better prospects of success and survival than any previous ethnic party. Moreover, the results at the polls obtained by most of the other parties seemed to reflect an intensifying ethnic polarity.