One of the most peculiar features of the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible translation is its so-called colometric division of the biblical text. This article offers a mapping of the range of considerations that guide Buber and Rosenzweig in determining each colometric unit. Drawing on the myriad exchanges in the Working Papers regarding the length and the rhythm of biblical cola, as well as the reading experience these cola elicit, I aim to show that colometry is not merely a theory of the breath-length rhythm of biblical speech, applied arbitrarily. Rather, the relative consistency with which Buber and Rosenzweig apply an overarching principle and a range of rules to their colometric divisions, suggest there is every reason to view colometry as the foundation of a poetics governing the Buber-Rosenzweig translation - one we might designate as the poetics of the spoken word.
This article examines the rabbinic directive that synagogues be elevated above all other buildings in a city, a law expressed differently in the Tosefta and the Babylonian Talmud. While later authorities like Maimonides treated these sources as reflecting a single, unified legal norm, closer analysis reveals meaningful differences. This study argues that these variations are not incidental but were shaped by each texts distinct geographic, political, and religious contexts. In so doing, the article challenges the tendency to prioritize purely textual explanations to explain differences between rabbinic corpora by highlighting how changing conditions contributed to the formulation and development of Jewish law across diverse rabbinic centers.
This study argues that sexual longing, attraction and eroticism fundamentally shape the narrative dynamics of Jos. Asen. Chaps. 1-21. Focusing on one of the most narratively developed Greek recensions (F, W, G - i. e., family f), it demonstrates that sexuality is not peripheral, but central to driving the plot forward. It explores explicit sexual imagery, symbolic settings and narrative tension generated through the protagonists repeated negotiation and transgression of spatial, social and sexual boundaries. Rather than secondary elements, erotic themes structure the depiction of Aseneths transformation and subsequent union with Joseph. Consequently, Jos. Asen. is best understood as a Jewish adaptation of Greek romantic literature, with eroticism and sexual dynamics providing the primary narrative impetus that frames theological and ethical concerns within the text.
This article explores late antique debates on fasting in Sasanian Mesopotamia through two texts rooted in a common cultural background: the Babylonian Talmud (Taʿanit 11a-b), emphasizing Rav Sheshets dictum, and Aphrahats Demonstration 3 (On Fasting). Aphrahats homily may shed light on Rav Sheshets remark by connecting the postmortem consumption of sinners bodies by dogs to the outcomes of dishonest fasting. Both texts use the biblical story of Naboths vineyard (1 Kings 21) to critique illegitimate fasting, depicting those with corrupt motives as subject to bodily defilement. In the Babylonian Talmud, the discussion of the Nazir concludes with Rav Sheshets dictum, underscoring the importance of proper fasting during Torah study. Aphrahat, in contrast, compares genuine fasts that promote repentance and spiritual growth with false fasts that result in punishment. This comparison highlights recurring literary themes and ideas shared across late antique rabbinic and Syriac traditions in Sasanian Mesopotamia.
A year apart, Walter Benjamin and Franz Rosenzweig each published a volume of translated poems and included short but pivotal essays on translation theory. The first is Benjamin's "Die Aufgabe des & Uuml;bersetzers" (The Task of the Translator, 1923), which appeared as a foreword to his translation of a selection of Charles Baudelaire's poems. The second is Rosenzweig's afterword to his translation of 92 hymns and poems by Jehuda Halevi (1924). This article seeks to examine the ways in which the theories presented in these two essays stand in relation to the translations in the respective volumes. Through close readings of two translated poems-Rosenzweig's "Die Liebenden" (The Lovers), and Benjamin's "Einer Dame" (For a Lady)-this article traces how the translators reflected, neglected or modified their concepts in their translations and what this in turn reveals about their respective approaches to language.
The article discusses an unpublished early modern Hebrew manuscript of miscellaneous content written by the Italian Jewish physician Avraham Joel Conegliano (1665-1745). After a brief introduction to the codex and its contents, the article focuses on the collection of practical and medico-magical recipes contained in the manuscript, which is considered an example of Hebrew books of secrets, a literary genre that has been almost completely overlooked in the field of Jewish studies. In the first part, the article presents an overview of the books of secrets that flourished in Italy and Europe during the Renaissance, and proposes the hypothesis that secreta literature in Hebrew developed, circulated and was actively used within Jewish culture during the medieval and early modern periods, albeit with significant differences. In the second part, the article offers a preliminary analysis of Conegliano's anthology of secrets, as well as a commented edition and English translation of selected textual excerpts from it.
This article argues that the use of copper as a medium is a neglected criterion for identifying the author or owner of an inscribed lamella amulet as Jewish. A survey of the corpora shows that roughly 40 percent of the known Jewish lamella are made of copper or a flexible copper alloy, but there are only four copper examples among the more than 100 Greek lamellae, with the same ratio between the extant handbook recipes for amulets in the Jewish and Greek handbooks. Two of the four copper lamellae inscribed in Greek have long been recognized as Jewish because of their content, and the other two seem to have been created by non-Jews in a manner that suggests or reflects an outsider's understanding that copper was an appropriate medium for Hebrew words or symbols.
This article examines the debate in tannaitic literature regarding the proper sequence of daily ritual services in the Temple. While the Torah does not explicitly define this order, the Tannaim developed different approaches to determining it, based on scriptural interpretation: one, represented in the Sifra, prioritizes rites performed inside the sanctuary (arranging the fire, tending the lamps, burning incense) before the daily offering on the outer altar; the second, found in Sifrei Zuta and the Mishnah, divides the daily offering ritual, placing the slaughter and blood sprinkling before the sanctuary services while reserving the burning of animal parts for last. These differences seem to reflect competing theological perspectives about the focal point of divine presence: whether in the Holy of Holies or at the altar of burnt offering.This disagreement appears within Rabbi Akiva's school and may have been influenced by the historical absence of the Ark in the Second Temple, which potentially shifted emphasis toward the outer altar.
This paper contributes new evidence to ongoing debates regarding the use of rabbinic literature as a source for interpreting synagogue art from Late Antiquity. While a mosaic in a 4th-century synagogue depicts Jonah the Prophet being swallowed by three successively larger fish, this motif makes its first appearance in textual sources only in the 11th century, when it shows up in both Jewish and Islamic traditions. How can the distribution of this motif across visual and textual mediums shed light on the relationship between rabbinic midrash and Jewsih visual culture? The Jonah panel challenges teleological accounts of the dissemination of traditions from rabbinic text to synagogue art. Moreover, it suggests that scriptural interpretation was not the sole province of the rabbinic movement. This approach to the study of Jewish art and text points to a world of cultural processes that operated beyond the regnant binary between rabbinic and non-rabbinic Judaisms.
This essay examines how targumic literature sheds light on the process of rabbinization. It organizes our extant targums, Jewish Aramaic Bible translations, into three contiguous periods and argues that each successive chronological layer of targum depicts a translational literature more aware of rabbinic titles, institutions and practices than the one that preceded it. This essay also begins the process of developing a historically oriented methodological paradigm for the study of targumic literature. It encourages scholarship on targum to resist the seemingly natural tendency to conflate the aims, agendas and authorizing agents of rabbinic and targumic literatures. Instead, scholarship should view these translations as historical and cultural artifacts of the late ancient and early medieval Jewish societies in which they were produced and during which they circulated-societies that included, but were not necessarily dominated or controlled by, the Judaism of the mishnaic and talmudic rabbis.
In the ninth century, a number of sources from the Western Mediterranean refer to the practice of post-slaughter inspection of the viscera of the animal. These include Jewish texts (the letter of Pirqoi ben Baboi, responsa of Natronai Gaon, and the traditions of Eldad Hadani), as well as Christian (Agobard of Lyon) and Muslim (Maliki jurists from Spain and North Africa). These texts and the apparent absence of references to this practice in earlier sources allow us to investigate continuity and differences between late antique and medieval Judaism in the region. In this way, the current article contributes to ongoing questions about "rabbinization" in the fifth through ninth centuries.
In the study of late antique Judaism, law and magic are often treated as distinct domains, with law regarded as elite and magic as popular. This paper challenges that dichotomy by exploring the overlap between legal and magical practices in both rabbinic texts and magical artifacts. I argue that ancient Jewish sources do not clearly separate the two, suggesting that following these modern scholarly distinctions may obscure aspects of late antique Jewish law. Belief in supernatural entities and the view of rabbinic law as a binding force capable of confronting them were integral to the rabbinic legal framework. Moreover, incantation bowls containing invocations of rabbis to confront demons through legal means demonstrate how rabbis were seen as authoritative figures beyond their immediate circles. These conclusions may challenge traditional definitions of rabbinization, which typically focus on the spread of legal norms.
Developing religious institutions are ultimately products of local environments despite their every effort to appear trans-regional and eternal. As I showed in Christianizing Egypt (2017), the production of Christian religion on the ground always involved a negotiation between local traditions, habitus and immediate landscapes (on the one hand), and new idioms of authority and charisma, including textuality (on the other hand) - a negotiation played out across multiple social sites that I have called syncretism. This paper investigates ways rabbinization might also be said to have involved syncretism, here in the context of scribal authority (as expressed in Babylonian incantation bowls) and in the context of iconic or magical writing (as expressed in late antique Palestinian synagogue floors).
This essay traces the development of messianic ideas and attitudes toward messianism among the rabbis from the amoraic to the geonic era. Classical rabbinic literature, here exemplified by Genesis Rabbah and the eschatological collection of b. Sanhedrin 96b-99a, is notably unenthusiastic about messianism, but by the 10th and 11th centuries leading proponents of rabbinic culture such as Saadya and Hai have come to embrace it. This development is in part a result of the process of rabbinization. In the era before the dominance of rabbinic culture, the rabbis threatening because of their potential for destabilizing society and their obvious engagement with Christian traditions. But once rabbinic culture was no longer the purview of the elite only, such traditions could be retouched to make them more compatible with rabbinic norms and integrated into geonic messianism.
The purpose of this essay is to open up a fundamental conversation about the concept of rabbinization, together with the adjective rabbinic, principally as a qualifier of Judaism. I shall follow these terms and concepts through the first title I have chosen refers to the Rabbanites, but the essay covers equally the earlier period, and it could equally have been entitled: "What made the rabbis rabbinic"? My purpose is not to answer these questions, but rather, to discuss and explain why they need to be asked.
This essay proposes new evidentiary models for the study of Jewish society in Late Antiquity based on textual corpora considered to be outside of the conventional rabbinic canon-such as magical literature, manuals of divination, and liturgical and occasional poetry in Hebrew and Aramaic. It argues that it is helpful to look at this evidence as a kind of archipelago, a cluster of outcroppings of deeper cultural production; that the relationships between those outcroppings are barely detectible below the surface; and that some new developments in the study of Late Antiquity, such as the study of lived religion, material approaches to textual sources, and social network theory can help us assess the opportunities and limitations of this point of view.This approach is illustrated through the case of Aramaic poetry for weddings from late antique Palestine.
It is well known that the Qur'an draws from the Mishnah in its discussion of value of human life and the severity of killing a person, based on the story of Cain and Abel (Q 5:32; m. Sanhedrin 4:12). Earlier in the same surah (5:18), the Qur'an alludes to a different Mishnah (Avot 3:14), and a third allusion is found in Q 9:30-31 (drawing on Avot 4:12). These three examples, in two of the latest Medinan sections of the Qur'an, provide important evidence for the Jewish traditions encountered in seventh-century Arabia. The Qur'anic data therefore provides a useful reference point for investigation the form and distribution of the Mishnah in this crucial period of "rabbinization"throughout the Middle East.
This study outlines Constantin von Tischendorfs lesser-known activities as a collector of Rabbanite and Qaraite books. Tischendorf amassed these items on two of his journeys to the eastern Mediterranean. They relate to his overall scholarly activities in significant ways, since their sale to the Imperial Public Library in Saint Petersburg gave him an opportunity to enter into conversation with Russian officials, who went on to fund his third journey, from which he brought a part of Codex Sinaiticus to Russia. His attitude towards Jewish sources was largely utilitarian: he thought of them as tools to better interpret the New Testament.
Bilingual writer Hanan Klenbort (1910–1992), known by his penname Ayalti, authored his first Yiddish novel »Bum« un keytn (»Boom« and Chains) in 1936. The novel sketched a blueprint for understanding the violence that erupted in Palestine just months after he finished writing. It framed the Labor Zionist settlements as anti-utopias, including in the sexual realm. Through examination of Ayaltis debut novels in Hebrew and Yiddish, this article shows the authors unusual linguistic transformation relative to his contemporaries. I will demonstrate how this linguistic shift was caused by the authors disillusionment by Zionism, causing him to turn away from its official language. Instead, he chose to create in Yiddish, a language spoken and simultaneously rejected by most Zionist settlers, but officially embraced by various circles of Jewish diaspora leftists. That shift freed him to represent the situation in Palestine through a uniquely critical and yet highly authentic lens.
This study focuses on the endowment activities of Jews living in Ottoman territories, particularly those resorting to Muslim courts. Within this scope, it examines trends in endowment preference, motivations and judicial practices. It is as an important step in understanding how Jews integrated with Ottoman society by establishing »Muslim-type« endowments and how they contributed to Ottoman Muslim society, and elucidates the emergence of Jewish interactions with Muslims within the realm of endowments. It concludes that there was no significant difference between Jews endowment activities and those of other Ottoman communities, indicating the absence of a strict classification between religions. It also finds that Jews, especially Karaites, had a pronounced inclination to integrate Muslim- Ottoman legal principles, particularly in the context of establishing and managing charitable endowments (waqfs).
