This article presents an alternative interpretation ofMartin Buber's concept of "Jewish land," distinct from that of Israeli art historiography. Relying on Buber's "Address on Jewish Art" at the Fifth Zionist Congress, Israeli art history has adopted as its foundational paradigm the notion that the national Israeli art style originates exclusively from the territory encompassing the State ofIsrael, devoid of diasporic roots. I will demonstrate that Buber's words have been taken out of context and argue for a metaphorical interpretation of these concepts, emphasizing human community. Through a rereading of the text, comparison with essays written by Buber around the same period, and examination of the reception of his words six and eight decades later, it becomes evident that for Buber, "land" served as a metaphor-one that later sparked the imagination of Israeli art historians.
Whereas Rabbanite Jews tended to portray the Karaites as a homogeneous group of heretics, Karaite authors from the late Byzantine and the early Ottoman period distinguished between Sephardim and Ashkenazim. These distinctions appear in Karaite exegetical, legal, and kabbalistic texts. Karaite scholars presented a positive image of the Sephardim as representatives of a nontalmudic Judaism, preferring to borrow Sephardic intellectual patterns and cultural legacy while largely rejecting Ashkenazic ones. This article traces the distinct images of Sephardim and Ashkenazim in the texts of Karaite authors in Byzantium and eastern Europe, as well as their attitudes toward the scholarship of these two Rabbanite groups. It further explores the extent to which the distinction between these groups stemmed from certain historical developments in Karaite and Spanish scholarship, from theological polemics between Karaites and Rabbanites, or possibly from cultural and social factors.
This article contributes to scholarship on Jewish spaces, most of which has explored Jewish communities in Europe. Beyond a preliminary discussion of the Mellah, the Jewish quarter ofMorocco, research onMorocco's Jewry has produced no studies about its other Jewish spaces from the spatial turn perspective. Here, I discuss the spaces in which modern Hebrew culture developed during the first half of the twentieth century. I argue that Hebrew activities in Morocco took place in three kinds of spaces: physical spaces, both traditional and new; textual spaces, in the local Jewish press, which serves as a platform, a display window, or a meetingplace; and imagined diasporic Hebrew spaces, with Palestine at their heart. I aim to highlight the pendulum movement between the physical spaces, which one could inhabit in person, and the imagined spaces, to which Hebrew devotees viewed themselves as belonging or aspired to belong. Hebrew spaces in Morocco were related to Hebrew spaces in Europe, Palestine, and the Americas through varying means of contact, immigration, inspiration, or imagination.
This essay argues that Joseph Soloveitchik maintained an instrumental conception of reason, and, in later texts, a critique thereof. After brief reference to the work ofHorkheimer and Adorno, the paper lays out Soloveitchik's ambivalence around reason, identifying it as the image of God and as a source of evil. Reason, Soloveitchik argues, is technological, aimed at understanding only in order to dominate. Conquering nature through reason allows humanity to overcome nature and attain dignity. However, when directed toward other subjects, reason becomes oppression. Soloveitchik is also concerned to provide the conditions ofpossibility for the ethical use of instrumental reason. Reason, Soloveitchik says, must recognize its limits. Reason can achieve its ends, but it cannot choose those ends. It cannot determine moral norms. Finally, the subject must restrain oneself in the face of another subject, recognizing the irreducible difference which leaves the Other forever outside their own comprehension.
The Hebrew language and its rapid development played a crucial role in modern Jewish history. However, scholarship on Modern Hebrew has not sufficiently explained how its abstract status as a national language was translated into the practical promotion of a Modern Hebrew-speaking community. The path of Hebrew and its advocates was neither simple nor serene and was accompanied by a lively public discussion across the multilingual Jewish press. By examining key press debates that occurred between 1875 and the outbreak of World War I, this article traces the formation of new linguistic norms. It shows how conventions concerning the national status of Hebrew, its prospect as a modern language, and its potential to serve as the basis of a new Jewish society were crystallized and laid the foundations that enabled it to become, eventually, a modern national language.
In this study, I explore the rationale behind the sequencing of the seven pillars in Isaac of Corbeil's Semak, as well as the possibility offinding religious meaning through this order. Such an exploration is valuable even though Isaac supplied his own explanation, as preserved within his list of commandments. In this list, Isaac maintains that the order of his seven pillars was dictated by the order of the first seven commandments of the Decalogue. However, a close reading of each pillar, as well as of Isaac's rationale, suggests otherwise. The Decalogue model does not adequately explain three of the seven pillars. I suggestan alternative scheme that, although less elegant, could better explain the rationale behind Isaac's structure. This approach is based primarily on his use of the well-known triad "thought-word-deed," which signifies the totality of human action in medieval Christian and Jewish sources.
RabbiAbraham ben David (Rabad) was a Talmud commentator, a rosh yeshiva in the city of Posqui & egrave;res in the Provence region of France, and was one of the first kabbalists. In the last third of the twelfth century, Rabad wrote Ba`alei ha-nefesh, a mainly halakhic treatise (six chapters on the laws of niddah). Rabad added an introduction and a seventh chapter at the end on moral issues. Ba`alei ha-nefesh is a unique book in several respects, most significant of which is Rabad'sformulation ofa sexual ethics alongside the halakhic discussion. There has not yet been an overall assessment ofRabad's purpose in his chapter on holiness ( (Sha`ar ha-kedushah): the creation of a sexual ethics. While before Rabad, Jewish authors addressed halakhic issues related to sexuality, none had dedicated a work to sexual ethics or sexual philosophy. Rabad founded afield that did not exist before him, and approached it in an innovative way. This article will explain this innovation through a literary and philosophical study and analysis of Sha`ar ha-kedushah.
In his writings, Saadiah Gaon classifies the commandments by two different methods: in his prayer book and in his commentary to Sefer Yezirah, he uses a pedagogical-metaphysical classification of the commandments as rooted in the Decalogue, while in other writings-in particular, in the Book of Beliefs and Opinions-he uses an epistemological-Mutazilite classification of the commandments as rational or revelational. This article argues that in the Book of Beliefs and Opinions, which was written after Saadiah's prayer book and his commentary on Sefer Yezirah, Saadiah strives to reconcile the two modes of classification. He does so through an original claim that the commandments should be divided into four parts. This quadripartite division of the commandments serves as an intermediate categorization that bridges the two former classifications-the rational-revelational and the classification based on the Decalogue.
Most sociological and ethnographical studies of Israeli Mizrahim are disconnected from those of Sephardic and MENA Jewish communities worldwide. Rooted in academic cultures that predate the country's establishment, Mizrahi history in Israel is often deemed either a success story or a shameful story of marginalization in these communities' global histories, and as a sui generis case of Jewish migration. We trace the early origins of this seemingly arbitrary disconnect to nineteenth-century European scholarship on "Sephardic" turned "Oriental" Jews and follow its subsequent entrenchment not only in Mandate Palestine and Israel but also in the United States. By focusing on key scholars working across transregional networks, we show how a Sephardic bias evolved into disciplinary divisions that have constrained the development of MENA Jewish studies. Finally, we call for renewed attention to the historical and contemporary patterns of separation, diffusion, and diasporic mobility that have long characterized MENA Jewish communities.
In spotlighting Job's reputation as a patient sufferer, the Testament of Job pays close attention to the negative emotions that Job successfully stifles and their association with power. Job's interlocutors contend that suffering renders one utterly powerless, and the fact that Job's emotions do not reflect his powerlessness is thus irrational. Their conception of power, which focuses on Satan's domination and Job's own reduced capacities, yields a set of "feeling rules" that demand specific emotional responses to suffering. Job objects to this perspective because it focuses exclusively on power dynamics in the material world. His conception of power produces different feeling rules: because Job's suffering restores agency, it should not provoke emotional excess in him. The author devotes significant attention to emotion in order to address the fundamental question raised by Job's predicament: Can suffering be an opportunity for empowerment? The Testament of Job is thus an ideal case study for examining the relationship between emotion and power.
In sixth-century Gaul, while the most frequent accusation directed by ecclesiastical elites toward the Jews was that the latter's determined obstinacy made them unreceptive to Christian preaching, a second-and rarely noted-charge was that Jewish-inflicted violence posed an ongoing threat to Christians. Rather than simply dismissing these ostensibly violent Jews as hermeneutical phantasms, it is constructive to consider the objectives underlying the accusations. A survey of these condemnations of harm inflicted by Jews on Christian bodies suggests that Christian elites were concerned less with protecting their coreligionists from bodily injury than with averting damage to the religious unity supposedly underlying both communal and political identities in post-Roman Gaul. Thus, Jewish violence was more than a mere literary or theological construct; it rather was a lens that reconfigured and reinterpreted both real and imagined acts of violence alike into a veritably monocausal phenomenon.
This article examines Jewish and Zionist diplomacy at the League of Nations in response to British attempts to restrict Jewish immigration and land acquisition following the 1929 riots in Palestine. Although they regarded the league with ambivalence, by 1930, the Zionists exerted considerable influence in Geneva. They owed this leverage to the local Zionist bureau, headed by Zionist internationalist Victor Jacobson, and to the personal diplomacy of the president of the nated in an informal Zionist- Genevese front in June 1930, when the critical of the British government and its endeavors to modify its Jewish national home policy. The report helped the Zionists in their diplomatic campaign to prevent restrictions on Jewish immigration and land acquisition. Still, it came with a price, straining the Anglo- Zionist alliance enshrined in the Balfour Declaration and the mandate.
David Ha- Reuveni, a sixteenth- century Jewish man of unknown origin claiming to be a prince of the Lost Tribes of Israel, was the author of one of the earliest-and most puzzling-of extant autobiographical documents of early modern Jewish culture. This work, a diary of an impostor, the literary aspects of which have received little scholarly attention to date, is a fascinating case study in self- fashioning. Employing the category of genre, and carefully analyzing this composition's layered truth claim, this paper mines Ha- Reuveni's scrappy, inventive employment of existing literary models. It examines this new kind of literary creation for a new perspective into the construction of identity, sincerity, and deceit- reflective of one extraordinary man, and of the culture and discourse within which he operated.
This study explores Samson Raphael Hirsch's polemical attitude toward the widespread use of catechisms among Reform pedagogues to convey Judaism's essence to Jewish youth within the setting of school-based religious education. It inquires into Hirsch's polemics against these instructional materials, illuminating their recurring presence in his body of work and in his thought. This examination uncovers features that define this specific pattern of polemics, while offering insight into its integral place within Hirsch's educational and broader conceptual framework. In so doing, it elucidates Hirsch's enduring concern with the intricate question of how to conceive and implement Jewish education in the modern era, a consideration deeply embedded in his theological thinking. It sets out to provide a more discursive understanding of Hirsch, predicated on a text-oriented reading of his contentions within their argumentative context as counter-responses to widely disseminated teaching sources.
Why did Jewish Palestine dissent from the global Jewish boycott of Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Whereas previous scholarship explains it with pragmatic considerations, this article draws on the "emotional turn" to explain the controversy within the Zionist movement and the Yishuv, and examines the roles played by the Zionist ethos of emotional restraint. Drawing on contemporary media and archival sources, the article examines the discourse about emotions that was part of the public debate about the boycott that raged in Palestine, and especially about the Ha'avarah (transfer) arrangement. This affair demonstrates that the relationships between emotions and political action are more complex than the simplistic dichotomy between "emotionality" and "practicality" that contemporaries employed and scholars have echoed. Further, it highlights how Jewish emotional life was politicized by the rise of Zionism.
The purpose of this article is to elucidate the contribution of Jewish soldiers to the defense of the Roman Empire in the third century. The first part discusses Jewish soldiers in the Roman army during the second and third centuries by looking at literary and epigraphic sources. The second part focuses on a passage of Zosimus's Historia nova that provides evidence that Jewish soldiers played an important, ifnotdecisive, role in the Battle ofEmesa in 272 CE. These Jewish soldiers may have been part of the nasi's Gothic Guard, whose existence is attested in the Jerusalem Talmud. I establish that Jewish soldiers were attested in the Roman army throughout the third century and that, while their contribution was relatively minor, the nasi's Gothic Guard, supplemented by other paramilitary forces composed of his tenants, helped secure Roman rule in the Near East during this politically unstable period.
The article describes Jewish school sermons (known as exhortations) that developed in the Habsburg Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Youth sermons as such were a novelty in the Jewish homiletical tradition, because until the nineteenth century, children were not among the target audiences of preaching. The article analyzes the origins of exhortations and discusses their legal and social context. Exhortations developed as part of Christian religious school practices, which, with the growing presence of Jews in public schools, were adjusted for them as well. The article presents the dynamics of their introduction and the typical themes they featured, and it presents them as a component of religious instruction received outside of the kheyders. Moreover, it investigates the affinities between Christian and Jewish youth sermons. Exhortations had not previously drawn the attention of scholars, and today they are a virtually unknown homiletical genre. They deserve our attention as an important facet of Jewish religious life in central Europe.
In this article, I examine Moses Isserles's (Krak & oacute;w, 1525-1572) interpretation of the medieval tradition that anticipated the annihilation of the world at the end of history. Originating in a talmudic legend, this tradition was developed and debated in the writings of medieval Sephardic philosophers and kabbalists in various intellectual settings. As I show, Isserles's autodidactic and provincial reading of the Sephardic texts allowed him to transform these medieval discussions and adjust them to the different intellectual, cultural, and social contexts of sixteenth- century Polish Jewry. The dearth of philosophers in the Jewish Polish arena brought Isserles to appropriate these philosophical discussions into ritualized meditations. Isserles's homiletical writings are examined here as an intersection of early modern Jewish and European intellectual histories, the history of reading, and ritual studies.
In spring 1935 the Jewish world celebrated the eight hundredth anniversary of Moses Maimonides's birth with public events, newspaper articles, and academic publications. At the time, the dominant historical narrative tied Rambam with Western Wissenschaft des Judentums, while the trope of Sephardic decline after the Spanish expulsion in the fifteenth century dominated narratives for eastern Mediterranean Jewry. This article argues that the initial attempt to dismiss the linear telling of eastern Mediterranean Jewish history came from the communities themselves already in the 1920s and peaked in the mid-1930s. While the 1930s unearthed deep anxieties in the Jewish world, this decade also saw a significant impulse within eastern Mediterranean communities to insert their own political and cultural stands. On the examples ofSarajevo and Cairo, this article historicizes the attempt to revise and amend Jewish historiographical narratives- long before postnationalist narratives and postcolonial revisionist histories entered modern Jewish studies.
This article explores the mechanisms by which Ha- Matateh, a satirical theater company, created a sense of well- being among its audiences during a time of crisis in prestate Israel. The article focuses on a revue by Ha-Matateh, Hayim and Sa`adiah Are Going to the City, which premiered in May 1939. This production referenced the stressful reality of the time: extreme antisemitism sweeping across Europe, diplomats feverishly trying to prevent another war, and a new White Paper issued by the British government jeopardizing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This article shows how this stage presentation transformed the fears and anxieties that dominated the real world into humorous expressions of pleasure, social engagement, success, and a sense of security.
