In this issue: Adiel Schremer and Benjamin Katzoff | The Tannaitic Tradition Concerning the Passover Celebration of King Hezekiah Menahem Kahana and Ofra Tirosh-Becker | Jeshua ben Yehuda’s Contribution to the Study of the Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai and Its Language Israel Ori Meitlis | ‘Sidrei Taharot’: An Attempt to Complete the Talmud as a Chapter in the History of Hassidism and Its Opponents (Hitnagdut) Simcha Emanuel | An Error Always Repeats Itself

Armenian Manuscripts of the David and Jemima Jeselsohn Collection is devoted to the five Armenian codices in the Jeselsohn collection in Zurich. Of great importance for Armenian studies and the history of art more generally, they represent various literary types, including biblical, hagiographic, homiletic, and liturgical texts. They also reflect an array of visual and artisanal traditions, connected to artistic centres in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Constantinople, and New Julfa, and span a period of over 300 years. A newly identified Sargis Picak manuscript is of exceptional importance for the study of medieval Armenian art, for its images, for Sargis’ colophons, and for a a hitherto unstudied ivory plaque of the Transfiguration. A Ritual of 1586 holds particular importance for scholars of the Armenian liturgy and its development in sixteenth-century Jerusalem. Also presented is a beautiful parchment leaf of the opening of the Gospel of John, studied and published previously by Michael and Nira Stone, and likely originating from a Bible produced in seventeenth-century New Julfa. Two Gospel Books complete this study: one from New Julfa, dated to 1695, and another likely produced in late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century Constantinople. This book was initiated and supported by David Jeselsohn, avid and longtime collector of archaeological artifacts, manuscripts, and Judaica. It was written jointly by Michael Stone and Christina Maranci. Maranci is an art historian and Stone is a specialist in Armenian philology, palaeography and codicology. Maranci bears primary responsibility for research on the miniatures – their art-historical analysis and iconography as well as their attribution, date, and context. Stone contributed the textual, codicological and palaeographical research, including translation of the colophons from the Classical Armenian (Grabar) into English, and catalogued the contents of all five manuscripts.

In a broken world, in which even God Himself is in a state of deep crisis, what is required in order to mend the rupture? How can one heal God and His world? Moreover, what might allow our actions to be effective? These questions stand at the heart of the Lurianic Kabbalah, the apex of the Safedian intellectual and religious renaissance of the sixteenth century, and one of the constituting phenomena of Modern Jewish thought. God as Patient presents medical discourse – the knowledge, language, and practice of medicine – as a significant key to our understanding of the Lurianic search for a way to mend reality, and first and foremost the Godhead. The book reads together the Lurianic texts alongside the medical writings of R. Hayyim Vital, R. Isaac Luria's chief disciple, and a medical practitioner. Consequently, the book analyzes how medicine becomes the model for the Lurianic language of action. In its final part, the book shows how God becomes in this Kabbalah the ultimate patient of the Lurianic Kabbalist, who in turn becomes the private court physician of the King of Kings, and needs, like every physician, the proper modes of healing to accomplish his task.

In this issue: Shira Shmidman | The Dispute between Rami bar Hama and Rava – New Perspectives Ariel Malachi | David Ben Saꜥad Al-Saꜥadi and the Intense Polemic Regarding Allegory in Yemen Oded Yisraeli | Keter Shem Tov of R. Shem Yov Ibn Gaon: A Chapter in the History of Nahmanides’ Kabbalah in the 13th–14th Centuries Oz Bluman | Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and the Recontextualization of Hasidic Innovation Gideon Freudenthal | 'Maꜥasseh Nissim'. Salomon Ben Joshua (Maimon)’s Commentary on The Homilies of Haran (R. Nissim Ben-Reuben Gerundi)

This book presents a comprehensive selection, translated for the first time into Hebrew, of the Latin works of Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), the "father of humanism" and a pivotal precursor to the Italian Renaissance. The compilation includes some of Petrarch's renowned personal letters, such as the pair he addressed to the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero. It features a therapeutic-autobiographical dialogue in which he engages with his spiritual father, Saint Augustine, challenging the latter's strict worldviews. The selection also encompasses an Invective against the dominant Aristotelian philosophy of his era, asserting the preeminence of classical rhetoric over philosophy; a novella presenting his interpretation of the closing story of the Decameron ; and a portion of his Latin poetry, through which he sought to revive the works of the great Roman poet Virgil. Through these writings, Petrarch fostered the emergence of a new secular culture on the cusp of the modern era—one that emphasizes humanity and life in this world—and set the stage for the remarkable creative surge of the Italian Renaissance.

For Louis Jacobs, the quest—the process of engaging with and thinking about Jewish faith—was a lifelong pursuit. He offered a model in the 1960s, a period characterized by general religious crisis, of an observant, committed, but intellectually curious Judaism that empowered individual seekers to address challenges to faith. In Orthodox Judaism at the time a battle was under way for religious control. Generating a widespread controversy in British Jewry known as the "Jacobs Affair", his thought offers a lens for examining the trajectory of Orthodoxy. In a contemporary context marked by the changing cultural and intellectual concerns of a "post-secular" age, the focus of some of these debates over religious control has shifted. Yet Jacobs' emphasis on a personal quest is as relevant as ever, perhaps more so. This first book-length analysis of his theology unpacks the building blocks of his thought. It argues that, despite its particularities and limitations, his approach can provide a powerful model for contemporary religious seekers in the context of a growing impetus away from established, denominationally bound forms of religion. Many orthodox believers across a range of faiths continue to prefer the certainty of unquestionable religious truth claims rather than pursuing a subjective search for religious meaning. For those seeking alternative models for the contemporary Jewish quest, a reconsideration of Jacobs’ theology can offer valuable tools.

A jubilee volume in honor of Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson. The book, which contains 22 articles written by Prof. Ben-Sasson's colleagues, students, friends, and family members is dedicated to phenomena of leadership in the Jewish world . The various articles examine conceptions, practices and ways of Jewish leadership from diverse perspectives and in varied times and places. They are based on variegated sources: historical and judicial documents, biblical exegeses, poetry, letters, Responsa, polemical and philosophical writings. The volume is a tribute to Prof. Ben Sasson's extensive academic and public activity.

To the Water , a monograph on the writer Yosef Haim Brenner, seeks to reimagine the conventional perspective on Brenner, shifting the focus from his role as a national prophet to that of a modernist writer. The chapters of the book collectively form a life story, not only of the writer himself but also of his artistic era, the era of early Hebrew modernism. This innovative literary language, forged through the wanderings of Brenner and his cohort of young, provincial writers in early 20th-century Europe, transcended mere "style". It constituted a profound way of thinking and experiencing the world, swiftly captivating its creators, bursting forth in their works with great originality, and, paradoxically, vanishing with the same swiftness with which it had arrived. The book strives to recontextualize Brenner's creative output, asserting that his style does not merely continue the tradition of European realism from the 19th century. Instead, it stands as a bold and uniquely Hebrew creation, distinct from anything that preceded it.

This collection presents short stories by Yiddish writers who worked in Israel and wrote about it. The stories chosen and translated into Hebrew especially for this book unfold a fascinating mosaic, a synthesis between the literary traditions of Yiddish in Eastern Europe and America and the Israeli language, landscape, characters, and world of images; Between the Jewish home that was destroyed in the Holocaust and the formulating reality in Israel. Yiddish fiction written in Israel confronts the reader with the kibbutz and the urban landscape, Holocaust survivors and Sabars, Arabs, Bedouins, and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and all over the world. The stories can also be read as an expression of the changes that took place in Israel, from the establishment of the state to the Lebanon War and the first Intifada, from the waves of mass immigration of the Mizrahim and of Holocaust survivors and their settlement in "abandoned villages" to the immigration of Soviet Union Jews in the 1990s.

The collective memory is not an innocent conduit carrying the cargo of the "authentic" past into the present, but a subject of constant struggle between different social forces, which have their own history. The discourse of the Holocaust in Israel has also undergone several incarnations during the last decades that reflected the complex interrelationship between "silence" and speech and the various tensions between private memories and collective memory. In this pioneering book - What Shall We Tell the Little Ones? - Yaakova Sacerdoti examines how Holocaust literature for preschoolers developed in light of the recurring questions on this topic over the years: Is it right to expose children to these horrific events of the past? And if so, how can the indescribable be described? The book examines these questions by describing over thirty children's books about the Holocaust, published since the beginning of the 1990s. Thus, Sacerdoti tries to reveal the literary and poetic techniques - both textual and visual - that children's writers used to try to circumvent the difficulties involved in conveying the experiences of the Holocaust to preschoolers.

The Book of Daniel is one of the later books of the Bible, and perhaps the latest of them. Its composition reaches up to Antiochus IV Epiphanes' persecution of the Jews and ends even before the liberation of Jerusalem and the purification of the Temple. The book is bilingual, written in Aramaic and Hebrew, and was written in the Hellenistic period in two different places: Babylon and the Land of Israel. Chapter 1, written in Hebrew, serves as an introduction to chapters 2-6, which are in Aramaic. The stories in these chapters are about Jewish courtiers in Babylon who manage to maintain their faith and the customs of the ancestors, even when their lives are threatened. They are then saved from the hands of their persecutors, and even rise to greatness in the courts of foreign kings. These chapters are intended to encourage Jews in the Diaspora to maintain their faith. Chapters 7-12 have a completely different tone. Chapter 7 is written in Aramaic and links the two parts of the book. Chapters 8-12 are in Hebrew. These chapters are visions that Daniel had, but required an angel in order to interpret and understand them. These visions are an interpretation of global and local historical events and their vicissitudes, which both occurred during the author's lifetime and are yet to occur in his future. The chapters written in Aramaic are translated into Hebrew, and appear facing the Aramaic text. This is the only book in the Bible that touches upon the resurrection of the dead, among other things. A special appendix is added, which surveys the development of the idea of the remaining soul and the resurrection of the dead.

Uri Zvi Greenberg’s early poetry, composed between 1912 and 1923, offers both a key to understanding his later work, and a means for re-conceptualizing modern lyrical discourse in general and modern Jewish lyrical discourse in particular. Often callow, this early work testifies to the poet’s quest for a way of writing poetry that would give voice to the Jewish experience in Europe just before and after World War I. Like many other Jewish poets of the period, Greenberg was aware of the pressing need to express Jewishness in a way that would allow for the continued existence of Jewish national identity, among nations jostling for independence in a Europe rife with tensions. Similar to many of these poets, Greenberg also knew that this expression would have to be, of necessity, grounded in modern subjectivity. Paying attention to the various literary, historical, and political contexts of Greenberg's writing, Green Mountain and Love traces the poet’s valiant attempt to come to terms with modern subjectivity, and in so doing, reinvestigate the mechanisms of modern lyrical discourse. It yields fresh insights into the nature of poetry; its aims and functions in the cultural, political, and historical arenas; and the reader’s relationship with the poetic word.