The book explores the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity. Through close literary readings and cultural analysis, the book reveals the gaps and tensions between idealized images of old age on the one hand, and the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging on the other hand. The authors argue that while rabbinic literature presents various statements on the qualities and activities that make for good old age, on the respect and reverence that the elderly should be awarded, and on harmonious intergenerational relationship, it also includes multiple anecdotes and narratives that portray aging in much more nuanced and poignant ways. These anecdotes and narratives relate, alongside fantasies about blissful or unnoticeable aging, a host of fears associated with old age: from the loss of physical capability and beauty to the loss of memory and mental acuity, and from marginalization in the community to being experienced as a burden by one’s own children. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity.

In this issue: Avishai Bar-Asher | The Earliest Extant Version of Sefer Yesirah Tamar Kadari | Thousands unto Solomon: The Relationship Between Midrash Kohelet Rabbah and Midrash Shir Hashirim Rabbah Elyashiv Cherlow and Adiel Breuer | Remnants of ‘Maʿasim Livne Ereẓ Yira’el’ Written on a Scroll

From this volume: Emanuel Tov | The Septuagint Translation of the Torah Was Based on Palestinian Sources Sholomo Bahar | Circular Patterns in Biblical Thought Ariel Kopilovitz | Regalia Deformed and Restored: Ezekiel’s View of Israel’s Future Leadership Rama Manor, Avi Gvura and Pnina Tromer | The Verb Lekh in the Bible: From a Verb of Motion to Urging of Action Mordechai Weintraub | A New Page of ‘Sefer Tagey’ from the Cairo Genizah Yigal Bloch | ʾEzrāḥ: and Dĕrôr: Two Instances of Assyrian Linguistic Influence in the Holiness Code and Nili Samet | The Origin of the Day of Yahweh Tradition: A New Suggestion

This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

In this issue: Sharon Weisser | ‘Is it Good to be Healthy?’ Philo as a Participant in the Ancient Debates about the Kinds of Goods Colten Cheuk-Yin Yam | Philo’s Knowledge of Medicine in his Later Roman Writings Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss | ‘What Shall I Leave for Old Age’: The Old and the Young in the Rabbinic Study House Avigail Manekin-Bamberger | Healing and Protection in Rabbinic Liturgy and in the Jewish Aramaic Incantation Bowls Warren Zev Harvey | Ibn Daud, Ibn Matut, and the Secret of the Garment Assaf Tamari | ‘Like … the Proficient Physician’: On the Tradition of the Physicians of the Soul, and Lurianic Kabbalah’s Uniqueness within it Jonathan Garb | The Somatic Medical Model in Or ha-Torah by R. Itzhak Eizik Haver

Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.

In this issue: Shira Shmidman | The Textual Witnesses of Tosefta Yevamot: New Finding in Light of the Cairo Genizah Fragments Gideon Bohak | I Beg You: Appeals to Angels in the Talmudic and Gaonic Periods Avishai Bar-Asher | The Bahir as It Once was: Transmission History as a Tool for Reconstructing and Reassesing the Text, Format, and Ideas of the Original Composition

After the Second World War, Poland experienced a radical transformation of its regime, a dramatic change of its borders and a large-scale resettlement of its population. The emergent Polish state lost its Eastern provinces to the Soviet Union and obtained areas east of the Oder-Neisse line as a compensation. Between 1945 and 1947, the vast majority of the German residents were expelled from the newly annexed territories, which were repopulated with Polish citizens, including around 100,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. This book focuses on the first two years of this resettlement in Lower Silesia, and illuminates how Poles and Jews dealt with the material heritage left behind by the Germans. Pointing to the importance of material culture for the political and individual sense of belonging, the book offers a new perspective on the formation of Polish society after 1945.

Leon Kellner was part of the intellectual and cultural elite of imperial Austria. Engaged in politics, a member of his regional parliament, and an essayist of repute, he was also a Zionist leader and confidant of Theodor Herzl. He created an institution for Jews’ cultural, educational, and social advancement modelled on London’s Toynbee Hall, which spread across east-central Europe to great effect. He was also an internationally recognized Shakespeare scholar. Yet for all this, today he is little known. How did someone born into a lower-middle-class Orthodox Jewish family from the province of Galicia come to gain such prominence in the Habsburg empire? Kellner’s is a thoroughly Habsburg Jewish story, spanning east and west and shaped by the empire’s history, politics, and culture. He was a singular character: a Galician Jew at home in Vienna and in Czernowitz, eyes towards Zion, yet content also in London, and never more so than when absorbed in the minutiae of Shakespeare’s texts. Kellner’s world was destroyed twice over: Habsburg Austria came to an end in 1918, east-central European Jewry in 1945. This biography recovers at least part of what was lost.

Written in Arabic in the first half of the ninth century, Twenty Chapters is the first medieval Jewish philosophical work, and had a major influence on the development of Jewish theological and philosophical thought. Dawūd al-Muqammaṣ, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who wrote this theological Summa after his return to Judaism, also authored the first Judeo-Arabic Bible commentaries, and some of the earliest Judeo-Arabic polemical works. The annotated Hebrew translation of this pioneering work, published here for the first time, presents al-Muqammaṣ in his intellectual and historical context and throws light on his Jewish, Muslim and Christian background.

In this issue: Chaim Milikowsky | The Transformation of Traditions and the Creation of Variant Readings in Vayyiqra Rabba Chapter 25 Sections 1-2 – Preceding and Succeeding the Redactorial Moment Shulamit Elizur | 'The birth of poems' – Deliberations on the Conception of the Poem and Longings for Zion in a Previously Unknown Piyyut by R. Judah Halevi Judith Weiss | The Sefer Yetzira Commentary Attributed to Isaac the Blind: Evidence Supporting Its Early Dating, Its Central Status among Thirteenth century Kabbalists and the Validity of Its Attribution to Isaac the Blind Simcha Emanuel | Rashba’s Responsa to North African Sages Israel Ori Meitlis | The Place of Izhbitza-Radzin Thought in the Tekhelet writings of the Radziner Rebbe

This volume is the first attempt at broad and deep research from a gender perspective into the halakhic attitude towards abortion. With the argument that halakhah reflects the male outlook and the consequent gender biases taken as its starting point, it examines the influence of gender concepts on contemporary halakhic rulings about abortion, in light of bio-ethical, conservative, liberal, and feminist theories, as well as the ideas of feminist legal theory and the feminist critique of the reigning epistemology. The book analyzes the gender implications of the stringent halakhic rulings of the twentieth century and the way they construct women. It asserts that the halakhic stance that takes the ban on abortion as a Torah-based prohibition constricts the idea of the sanctity of life to biological terms only and thereby highlights the reduction of women to mainly an entity for reproduction. The research raises a number of questions that have never been asked before: How do the decision makers see the female essence in general, and specifically in the context of abortion? Where do the woman’s needs rank on the scale of the decision makers' considerations? Are women perceived as subjects with their own interests and will—or are these deemed irrelevant and appropriated for the benefit of the collective (the family, the Jewish people)? These questions serve as the foundation for the discussion in the present volume. Even though it deals mainly with abortion, I suggest that it be seen as demonstrating the masculine identity of the halakhic discourse in general.