Ever Turning Blows the Wind examines the cultural world of Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulay - Hida (Jerusalem 1724 - Livorno 1806). This book explores the cultural and intellectual figure of Hida, a native of Jerusalem, who spent many years traveling in North Africa and Europe until he settled in Livorno, Italy. It examines several of his numerous works, representing various genres. The defining aspects of his character, emerge from Hida's writings. The expressions of his self-image, his attitude towards different societies and cultures and different bodies of knowledge, influenced by the cultural spaces he crossed in his travels, are discussed here. Examination of Hida’s writings, with their various genres, shows that Hida’s figure contains some of the old, traditional world where he was born and raised and formed his personality, and the modern world which was discovered to him in his travels and which aroused his interest and its effects on him are clearly evident in his writings. Therefore, the research of Hida’s figure enables an examination of the influence of the new inside the traditional surroundings and the existence of these two entities side by side.

In the preface to his book Emek Hamelech Rabbi Naftali Bacharach lists his ten books, noting that the first is Emek Hamelech , and the second is Gan ha-Melekh , his commentary on the Zohar printed here for the first time. Bacharach's style in Emek Hamelech is similar to his style in Gan Hamelech , however, while Emek Hamelech was written according to the order of Emanation, Gan Hamelech was written as a commentary to the Zohar. In general, the Kabbalistic writing of Bacharach is characterized by the fact that it is full of messianic tension, and unlike most descriptions of the Emanation in Lurianic Kabbalah that we are familiar with, Bacharach also describes the first stages of the Emanation in Messianic terms.

Problems of Discipline explores the social and cultural function of the state system of secondary education in the Russian empire’s north-western provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how schools facilitated socialization into informal, yet non-radical forms of political and social activism, and demonstrates, furthermore, how ideas of civil activism and communal commitment, typical to the contemporary Russian critical public discourse, led to the creation of a distinctive Jewish student subculture which contributed, subsequently, to the emergence of a new socially committed Jewish-Russian elite. Thus Problems of Discipline suggests a new conceptualization of the emergence of local – Jewish and other – elites and, in a broader view, a new understanding of the modes of Russian imperial socialization.

Kobez Al Yad , an annual of the Mekize Nirdamim Society, is a forum for the publication from manuscript sources of ancient texts in Jewish studies that are shorter than book-length. The articles in this issue: Yeruḥam Aviad Goldman | The Secret of The levirate Marriage and Ḥalitzah : A Kabbalistic Text Attributed to Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla Naʿama Ben-Shaḥar and Tzaḥi Weiss | Ten Holy Sefirot, and their Inverse : A Commentary on the Ten Sefirot alongside the Left Emanation Eliezer Baumgarten and Uri Safrai | Some Traces from R. Isaac of Acre’s early draft of Otzar Ḥaim Eli Gurfinkel | Commentary on Lamentations (1:1–6) by Rabbi David ben Yehuda Messer Leon Yohanan Kapaḥ | Rabbi Joseph Ḥayyun’s Commentary on the Book of Malachi

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

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.

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

The Hebrew community that lived in Acre during the British Mandate period did not leave an actual signature on the urban landscape, and did not record glorious tales of heroism or destruction. This fascinating story, which had been omitted from the collective memory and is currently revealed in depth in this book, illuminates this community's place in the building of the Jewish national society in Palestine. In particular, the book reveals the complex relationships that existed between the Zionist institutions and the Jewish and Hebrew societies in the Arab cities. Despite the decline of the old Jewish communities in the Arab cities, the unusual story of Acre shows how it managed to attract new, nationalist settlers. For a brief moment in the city's history, a Hebrew community existed that combined old and new settlements, had a national Zionist orientation and included Jews with local and Mizrahi recognition. This is a local story, but it seeks to shed light on the complexity and diversity of the Zionist enterprise in relation to the Arab and mixed cities of mandatory Palestine, by raising questions about the relationship between the "history of a place" and the "national history". Through the description of the failure of the Hebrew settlement in Mandatory Acre, the book looks at the Zionist project as a fascinating meeting point between the dreams of those who created the leading narratives and between the local interests and the geographical conditions unique to the region.