Abstract: This article presents a reconstruction of a Second Temple aspiration to transfer the tomb of Joseph from his burial site in Shechem, as recorded in the Bible (Josh 24.32), to the traditional burial site Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Cave of Machpelah. In the main section of this article, I reconstruct this relocation through an analysis of Joseph’s burial narrative in the Jewish Antiquities of Josephus, supplemented by an examination of other sources ( Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and rabbinic literature). In the final section, I identify the roots of this burial tradition in an ancient biblical polemic over the burial place of Jacob between the two centers of Shechem and Hebron.
Abstract: Jewish ethics is known for its focus on text and textuality, and in some cases, for an antipathy toward the visual and visual art. In this paper I turn to three formative authors in Modern Jewish philosophy—Emmanuel Levinas, Mara Benjamin, and Joseph Soloveitchik—to argue that Jewish notions of obligation, or ḥiyuv in Hebrew, require a conception of obligated sight . Although these three authors disagree about the nature of Jewish obligation, they all agree that obligation is an embodied phenomenological reality of Jewish life. Therefore, they all have articulations of the way sight operates in a world of obligated bodies, even if they are unaware of or ambivalent about the prevalence of vision in their own accounts. For these thinkers obligated sight becomes the way that someone living under ḥiyuv encounters the world, a way of perceiving objects as bristling with potential moral and religious obligations. Analyzing the ways that obligated vision, as articulated in phenomenologies of ḥiyuv , operates in everyday life provides us with powerful insights for doing Jewish ethics, particularly for doing Jewish ethics with visual objects and artwork.
Abstract: This essay aims to analyze a possible influence of Catharism on some of the biblical commentaries of Gersonides (Provence, 1288–1344). In several of his commentaries on the Pentateuch—especially on the Book of Exodus—Gersonides makes the striking claim that Pharaoh sought to persuade the Hebrews that their God was evil and would bring harm upon them if they attempted to worship him in the desert. In this interpretation, Pharaoh presents himself as a worshipper of the good God and portrays Moses as a servant of the evil one. According to Gersonides, both Moses and God must work to convince the people that the God of the Hebrews is in fact a benevolent deity who performs good deeds for his followers—for instance, by providing clean water at Marah. This interpretation is highly unusual. However, if we consider that Gersonides was likely aware of the Cathars—a dualist religious movement active in Provence during his lifetime, which regarded the God of the Old Testament as evil—we may better understand his exegetical approach. It is plausible that Gersonides employed his knowledge of Cathar beliefs to offer a polemical or interpretive response within his biblical commentary.
Abstract: This article examines the representation of Jewish immigrants in Argentinian popular theater during the early twentieth century, with a focus on the play El barrio de los judíos (The Jewish Neighborhood, 1919) by Alberto Vacarezza. It explores how the sainete criollo , a dominant theatrical genre of the period, constructed immigrant characters through exaggerated linguistic markers, cultural stereotypes, and caricatured portrayals, illuminating broader societal anxieties about the place of the Jewish immigrants in Argentinian society. By analyzing the theatrical techniques used to stage Jewish characters in El barrio de los judíos , this study investigates how these performances engaged with contemporary debates on assimilation and national belonging. Furthermore, the article situates these phenomena within the political climate of the time, particularly in relation to the Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) of 1919. Through this analysis, the article highlights the role of popular theater as a space for negotiating the tensions surrounding Jewish immigration, cultural integration, and the limits of national inclusion in early twentieth-century Argentina.
Abstract: The census taking of the Jews played a central role in the modernization of the states in eighteenth-century Europe. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prussia and Bohemia, Jews were the first to be so systematically enumerated on a statewide scale. In order to reconstruct fiscal condition and civic order, states made extensive use of censuses of the Jews to control population growth, estimate taxation, and limit residence rights. This direct extension of state power (or “biopower,” to use Foucault’s term) over an individual subject often exceeded the governance capacities of the local officials, who sought optimization at the expense of knowledge. At the same time, Jews actively negotiated their position by hiding and reclaiming control over their status. The study argues that the lack of ritual meaning of a census in Judaism (in contrast to the Christian tradition) and the routinization of the process on the part of the administration were the key factors that hindered the census taking and, consequently, the effective modernization of states in east-central Europe. The paper traces the development of censuses between three main contributors, the state, census takers and respondents, by examining the legal context and enumeration practices based on a novel dataset consisting of almost 145 000 individuals living in fifty-three regions between 1764 and 1809. In tracing the spatial patterns of census taking, standard measures of child sex ratios and child proportions in the census lists of the Jews are compared with the non-Jewish data.
