This article examines how communal activists, leaders, intellectuals, and the Yiddish press understood and reacted to charges regarding purported Jewish criminality, which accusers often linked to the need to curtail immigration to America. The Jewish self-image as a nonviolent people proved to be quite resilient, and one of the ways to reconcile the existence of Jewish criminals with that self-perception was to put the blame on the surrounding (American) influence, or to evoke generalized negative images of gentiles as a foil for applauding Jewish qualities. New York Jews construed their relations with the larger non-Jewish society as a continuation of old-world patterns of Jewish-gentile relations rather than a change or reversal of them. The criminal episodes demonstrated how a cultural net of transnational meanings shaped Jews' understanding and reaction to allegations against them.

This article proposes an analysis of two homiletic units in the Palestinian Midrash Leviticus Rabbah, which revolve around biblical chapters pertaining to sacrifices. A theme that pervades these units is that of eating as an animalistic activity that often entails moral depravity. In contrast, the act of sacrificing is constructed in these units as one in which one is willing to give up one's own nourishment, and in a sense one's own “soul,” in order to offer it to God. Many of the motifs used to vilify eating in the Midrash can be traced in moralistic Greek, Roman, and early Christian diatribes preaching for moderation in eating or for asceticism; the homilists in Leviticus Rabbah, however, utilize these popular motifs in order to present sacrifice as the spiritual contrary of eating, and thus to give the obsolete practice of sacrifice cultural cachet and compelling meanings.

The Bavli's story of Herod's rise to power, murder of the Hasmonean family and of the rabbis, encounter with Bava b. Buta, and construction of the temple, found at Bava Batra 3b-4a, has long puzzled scholars. Many aspects of this story diverge from Josephus's account, our main source for historical knowledge of Herod's life and deeds. This paper argues that the storyteller has been influenced by Persian sources from the Sasanian period. Important elements of the Bavli story were modeled on the account of the rise of Ardashir, founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as recounted in a Sasanian text known as the Karnamag i Ardashir i Pabagan, “The Book of the Deeds of Ardashir son of Pabag.” The rabbis understood the transition from the Hasmonean to Herodian dynasties through the prism of the transition from the Parthian to Sasanian dynasties. They identified Herod with Ardashir, and constructed a story of Herod's usurpation and rise to power on the basis of Ardashir's usurpation and rise to power as recounted in Sasanian sources.

This study presents the ideas about setting times for Torah study in the writings of R. Shneur Zalman of Liady (Rashaz) as one of the elements that formed the inclusive concept of mystical experience in the Ḥabad movement. The article argues that in his teachings Rashaz invested common experiences and the precepts of normative, non-mystical Judaism with mystical meanings, and thus proposed a new, inclusive concept of mystical experience. The reinterpretation of the precept of setting times for Torah study in Rashaz's writings was one of the factors that greatly contributed to the re-evaluation of the role of ordinary people in religious life, and to shaping Ḥabad's inclusivist vision of mysticism.

Ascetic systems commonly exhibit some sort of conflict between spiritual pursuits and mundane needs. This article contextualizes the particular rabbinic dilemma of study versus sustenance within the broader context of the Zoroastrian tradition and its critique of the Manichaean Elect. The rabbis shared with their Zoroastrian contemporaries not only the perception of a religious tension between agriculture and the pursuit of religious studies, but also a multifaceted array of possible solutions that attempt to harmonize, mitigate, or otherwise resolve this theological and practical tension. While the basic conflict between study and sustenance is already formulated in tannaitic works, it is argued that the unique perspective offered by the Babylonian Talmud engages, and perhaps reacts to, the Iranian tradition.

In 1597 King Philip II of Spain expelled the Jews from Milan at the end of a thirty-year power struggle between secular and religious Italian authorities and Spanish imperial powers. These conflicts reveal that the expulsion followed less from Philip II's personal feelings about the Jews than from his approach to governing and the necessity to preserve and increase his power in Italy. They also expose the fluctuating boundaries of imperial powers in distant territories resistant to accepting them, highlighting both the extent and the limits of Spanish rule in Italy. Examined in detail and in its larger historical context, the case of Milan elucidates the mechanisms of an expulsion, foregrounding the intricate political, financial, and religious issues that led up to the last Spanish expulsion in Europe.

Food and feasting narratives illuminate the social politics of disaster in the Babylonian Talmud's lengthiest account of the destruction of Jerusalem (Bavli Gittin 55b–58a). Key moments in this sugya center around food: the shame of Bar Kamẓa at a feast sparks his eventual betrayal of the Jews, the tale of Marta bat Boethus recounts the starvation of the wealthiest woman in Jerusalem, and Caesar destroys Tur Malka in retaliation for an opulent banquet. This article contextualizes these rabbinic narratives within the social politics of Roman and Sasanian banquet culture, while also parsing the intersections of gender, class, and social status in these disaster tales. Through its critical representation of high-class oblivion, the sugya calls attention to the ethical cost of elite status by highlighting the physical and moral dangers of social privilege. Its stories of luxurious eating emphasize how corrosive concerns about status and shame often lead elites to protect their private interests by sacrificing the well-being of the broader community. Its feasting narratives assert that wealth, luxury, and social privilege distance elites from the awareness of suffering in their midst.

The formulation and application of rabbinic Halakhah often depends on the determination of facts that belong, to one degree or another, to the province of professional experts. The resulting structural tension is analogous to that posed by the prominence of the expert witness in the modern American court, or the active role of private industry in administrative law. This article examines the relationship in the classical rabbinic corpus from Palestine between rabbis and farmers, or between rabbinic and agricultural expertise. It considers whether agriculture would have been conceived of in this context as a specialized or technical body of knowledge, and, if so, whether and how agricultural Halakhah accommodates itself to this fact.

The introduction of non-halakhic material into a halakhic section of a classical rabbinic work is a redactional choice that can substantially affect the interpretation of both kinds of material. Understanding the relationship between the non-halakhic material and the surrounding halakhic material can affect one's assessment of the redactor's activity. Conversely, assumptions concerning the redactor's activity can affect the interpretation of the non-halakhic material.

The relationship between halakhic and non-halakhic material and the implications of that relationship for redaction critical investigations are particularly complex in the case of the Tosefta, because the latter is not a completely independent composition. Some scholars see the Tosefta as an interpretative work based on the Mishna while others argue for a degree of redactional independence. What then is the proper context for the interpretation of materials found in the Tosefta—the Tosefta itself or the Mishnah? The answer to this question will crucially affect our interpretation of the non-halakhic material included in the Tosefta and the relation of that material to the halakhic material. This article demonstrates the difficulty in determining the proper redactional context for the interpretation of Toseftan passages that contain halakhic and non-halakhic material by examining the story of Rabbi Yehuda walking behind his teachers in T. Berakhot 1.2. The reason for inserting the story can be understood in three ways, corresponding to three different definitions of the “halakhic context,” in which the Mishnah has a greater or lesser controlling influence over the Tosefta.

The Babylonian Talmud (BT) attributes the idea of committing a transgression for the sake of God to R. Naḥman b. Isaac (RNBI). RNBI's statement appears in two parallel sugyot in the BT (Nazir 23a; Horayot 10a). Each sugya has four textual witnesses. By comparing these textual witnesses, this paper will attempt to reconstruct the sugya's earlier (or, what some might term, original) dialectical form, from which the two familiar versions of the text in Nazir and Horayot evolved. This article reveals the specific ways in which, value-laden conceptualizations have a major impact on the Talmud's formulation, as we know it today.

Much has been written on rabbinic polysemy over the past two decades, and yet the precise nature and dating of this phenomenon remain a matter of controversy. This note, which aims to help clarify the issue, is a response to Steven Fraade's essay, “Rabbinic Polysemy and Pluralism Revisited: Between Praxis and Thematization,” published in this journal. Surveys of the history of the polysemy debates are readily available; my present concern is with Fraade's position, and the positions to which he is responding, chief among them Daniel Boyarin's claim that rabbinic polysemy is a relatively late, post-tannaitic, phenomenon. Fraade sets out to refute this claim, and his essay provides a dozen passages that serve as “countertexts to [Boyarin's] arguments” (5). The aim of this response is to show that the rabbinic sources in question are not countertexts, and that polysemy is, in fact, a post-tannaitic phenomenon.

The author revisits texts and arguments from his 2007 article in AJS Review 31 no. 1 in response to a “response” by Azzan Yadin-Israel in the April 2014 issue (38, no. 1). The central question is whether the widespread rabbinic textual practices of interpretive polysemy and legal multivocality are the product of the post-amoraic (“stammaitic”) editorial layer of the Babylonian Talmud (Yadin-Israel) or are already evidenced and theologically thematized in the earlier “tannaitic” rabbinic collections from the Land of Israel (Fraade).

In an era of massive university budget cuts and pervasive malaise regarding the future of the humanities, cinema and media studies continue to be a growth industry. Many academic fields have been paying increasing attention to film, in terms of both curriculum development and research. Jewish studies is no exception. Since 2011, a boom in publications has included a range of new books that deal with Jews on screen, Jewish themes in cinema, and the construction of Jewish identity through film. To assess what these recent titles contribute to Jewish cinema studies, though, requires assessing the parameters of the field—and that is no easy task. The definition of what belongs is as elastic as the boundaries of Jewish identity and as perplexing as the perennial question, who is a Jew? Consequently, the field is wildly expansive, potentially encompassing the many geographical locales where films on Jewish topics have been produced as well as the multiple languages and cinematic traditions within which such films have emerged. At issue are not just numerous national cinemas, but also transnational productions and international histories. Yiddish film, for instance, was produced in Poland, the Soviet Union, the US, Argentina, and other places as well. Compounding the challenge of assessing the field of Jewish film is the fact that Jewish studies overlaps with Holocaust studies, itself a vast enterprise that has grown dramatically over the past two decades. A simple WorldCat search, restricted to scholarly books from respectable academic presses, turns up dozens of titles on cinema and the Holocaust published since the year 2000. Not surprisingly, the long-standing debates on “what is Jewish literature?” have morphed into controversy over “what is Jewish cinema”?

In his Epistle to Yemen, Moses Maimonides answers an anonymous Jewish apostate's polemical claims about the truth of Islam. This apostate challenged the Yemenite Jews by presenting quotes from the Torah that Muslims considered proof of the future advent of Islam and Muḥammad (dalā'il). The identity of the apostate, however, has been disputed by researchers. This article proposes that the apostate Maimonides had in mind was Samaw'al al-Maghribī, the Jewish convert who authored Ifḥām al-Yahūd. The reasoning is based on unique characteristics of Samaw'al's tract that distinguish it from other polemical works. Samaw'al discussed the dalā'il with much greater sophistication than any earlier polemicist and used an advanced manner of presentation, in response to which Maimonides provided well-conceived refutations. This combination of Samaw'al's sophisticated polemical arguments and Maimonides's replies demonstrates that the two appear to be matched.

From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, the rabbinic courts of southern France (Provence and Languedoc) found themselves dealing with an increasing number of cases in which plaintiffs were using the court as leverage in a struggle that was taking place outside the court. This period also saw the first legal advocates appearing in Jewish courts. These two related phenomena point to a shift in Jewish legal culture, part of a move throughout thirteenth-century Mediterranean Europe towards what Daniel Lord Smail has called “consumption of justice.”

Approaching A Guest for the Night from the point of view of the Book of Jeremiah––from which this novel draws its title––leads us to revisit two central components of Agnon's theology and stylized identity. First, his majestic evocation of a deity (Jeremiah's “guest”) who abandoned his “wife” (the people of Israel); and concomitantly, Agnon's lifelong preoccupation with the “‘agunah problem” as a metaphor for national rupture, in ways that for Agnon were linked to his vocational identity as a modern writer dedicated to the project of national repair. Through his conversation with the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations traditionally attributed to this prophet, Agnon adjusts and reduces the diasporic weight assigned to the ‘agunah metaphor. In his midlife masterpiece, he enlists the midrashic concept of ‘aginut to explore, among other things, his own composite identity as a traditional Jew and modern Jerusalemite, lover of texts and absent-minded husband.

Unlike the works of the “old masters” in the fine arts, often seen as the apotheosis of the creative spirit of their and all time, works of historiography have a much briefer shelf life. It is in the nature of scholarship to subject forebears to critical scrutiny; few works hold up beyond a generation or so. We are charged in this forum with reconsidering one of the “old masters” of Jewish historiography, Salo Wittmayer Baron, whose formidable mastery of languages and sources and his prolific output position him as one of the preeminent twentieth-century historians of the Jewish people. Has Baron's three-volume The Jewish Community, a masterpiece of historical synthesis first published in 1942, still retained its scholarly relevance? What is striking about this work is how much ahead of his time it was in certain respects, and how, in this work on a subject so central to understanding pre-modern Jewish life, Baron's construction was ahistorical in crucial dimensions. Baron's Jewish Community has fallen into disuse, so much so that in the Hebrew collection, Kehal Yisrael (2004), intended to portray specific Jewries and their communal lives, the latter two volumes, comprising dozens of essays and over 800 pages, written by leading Israeli scholars, contain only two references to Baron, in the notes. This blatant example of ignoring Baron's treasure trove is true not only of Israeli scholarship: most recent studies of Jewish communities make scarcely any use of it. Is the neglect deserved?