Tarbiz is the only Hebrew academic journal devoted to the entire range of Jewish studies. Appearing quarterly, this journal is the principal forum for the expression of the most important developments in Jewish studies in our generation, and among its contributors are the leading scholars in the various fields of Jewish studies in Israel and the world, as well as young scholars who are beginning to make their mark. Tarbiz was first published in 1930 by the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the editorial pen of Prof. Jacob Nachum. Purchase of the subscription online includes domestic shipping via registered mail of the Israel Post. Other delivery options are available in the online form . International subscriptions include shipping via Fedex.

A refugee crisis of huge proportions erupted as a result of the mid-seventeenth-century wars in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Tens of thousands of Jews fled their homes, or were captured and trafficked across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Rescue the Surviving Souls is the first book to examine this horrific moment of displacement and flight, and to assess its social, economic, religious, cultural, and psychological consequences. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in twelve languages, Adam Teller traces the entire course of the crisis, shedding fresh light on the refugee experience and the various relief strategies developed by the major Jewish centers of the day. Teller pays particular attention to those thousands of Jews sent for sale on the slave markets of Istanbul and the extensive transregional Jewish economic network that coalesced to ransom them. He also explores how Jewish communities rallied to support the refugees in central and western Europe, as well as in Poland-Lithuania, doing everything possible to help them overcome their traumatic experiences and rebuild their lives. Rescue the Surviving Souls offers an intimate study of an international refugee crisis, from outbreak to resolution, that is profoundly relevant today.

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: Menahem Eisenberg | Qerovot for the 17th of Tammuz Attributed to Rabbi El’azar berabbi Qillir Sarah Cohen | Tokhehah poems according to the model of ‘Shikḥi yegonekh’ by Shelomo ibn Gabirol Simcha Emanuel | Additional Glosses of Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam) to Alfasi Chen Maaravi and Adam Afterman | A Unique Version of the Kabbalistic Collections Ascribed to the Unpublished Fourth Part of ‘Sha‘arei Kedushah’

On Friday, March 11, 1026, Yoshiyahu, the only son of the Dayan of the Jewish community in Gaza City, Rabbi Yeshua HeHaver berrebi Nathan, passed away suddenly at the age of six. The bereaved father, who found it difficult to console himself, wrote a comprehensive Qedushta in memory of his son. The Qedushta is a set of piyyutim that was recited during the Amida of Shacharit on Shabbat, and was written according to fixed rules. The father conformed to the technical rules of the form of the Qedushta, but infused unique content into the piyyutim: He expressed in them his great pain and illustrated it with his repeated cries, and also included detailed descriptions of his son, who studied Torah all day. On the other hand, he also tried to deal with his grief in traditional ways, out of faith in God who brought this disaster upon him because of his sins. In one passage he even gave a list of bereaved fathers mentioned in the Bible, starting with Adam, who mourned his son Abel, and tried to convince himself that he was no better than they. The Qedushta was discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost in its entirety, in a unique manuscript which is the author’s autograph, its pages scattered among various libraries. These pages were discovered bit by bit over decades. In this book, all the parts of the Qedushta that have come down to us are printed together for the first time, accompanied by a commentary and a detailed introduction. The introduction discusses the unique contents of the Qedushta and the methods of its design. Rabbi Yeshua’s Qedusuta is compared to the works of several contemporary poets who dealt with disasters: on the one hand, to poems written in Spain, most notably the laments of Rabbi Samuel HaNagid over the death of his brother; and on the other hand, to the poems of Rabbi Samuel the Third, written in the wake of the pogrom against the Jews of Egypt, in which he was arrested and saved at the last moment from execution; and a man named Abraham HaCohen, who wrote piyyutim while imprisoned due to a financial dispute. In light of these comparisons, the purpose of the Qedushta is also discussed, with an attempt to clarify whether it was intended to be recited in public prayer, and when such a prayer could have taken place. Furthermore, the Qedushta is a fascinating human document, full of fatherly love and pain over loss. The struggle to cope with bereavement, unfortunately, is not over. The fact that these events took place a thousand years ago in Gaza also takes on special significance in these days.

This commentary lay hidden for centuries in a single manuscript that eventually made its way to the British Library in London. This edition consists of three parts: 1. A lengthy introduction , which, in addition to bibliographic and historiographic details about the author of the commentary and an account of the manuscript’s journey to the library where it is now housed, also contains a detailed analysis of his exegetical method and a discussion of his sources. 2. The body of the commentary by Rabbi Isaac ben Samuel, which includes an exegetical translation of the verses of II Samuel and their interpretation, both in Judeo-Arabic. Alongside these appear the Hebrew translation of the verses and their commentary, prepared by the editor. The layer of annotations , comprising notes that address the explanation of the commentary, its textual variants (including those found in a partial manuscript preserved in the St. Petersburg Library), its language, the sources on which it draws, and the scholarship related to it.

In this volume: Avi Shveka | The Prohibition to Capture a Mother Bird along with Her Young: A Reassessment Itamar Kislev | The Story of Nadav and Avihu: A Renewed Examination Yisca Zimran | Motion and Change in Micah 1:2–9 Noam Mizrahi | On the Importance of Text-critical Secondary Versions for Reconstructing the Literary Formation of Isaiah 61:1–7 Uri Gabbay | The Mesopotamian ‘Mouth Washing’ Ritual: A Hebrew Translation And more...

Simon Bernfeld (1860–1940) was one of the most popular Jewish European writers of the early twentieth century. A prolific bestselling author in a broad range of fields of history and Jewish studies, and a pivotal figure in the renaissance of Jewish national culture. His oeuvre encompassed dozens of books, hundreds of essays, and thousands of daily columns published in Hebrew and German. Yet despite his vast influence, Bernfeld remained outside the mainstream. His prominent presence until the late 1920s stands in stark contrast to his subsequent obscurity. This gap prompts for an examination of whether his “forgetting” was deliberate and connected to the historical narrative he sought to promote. His political views, expressed in his sermons as a modern rabbi in Belgrade, in his polemic essays criticizing both the rabbinate and the Zionist Congress, were similarly marginalized. On The Margins: A Biography of Simon Bernfeld unfolds a biography woven into the history of the Jewish intelligentsia circles in Galicia, his birthplace, and Berlin, where he lived for many years until his death. His correspondence with a wide array of figures reviles the emergence of Hebrew mass media and a national canon. Through spatial and cultural analysis, exploring themes of Jewish imperial relations and intra-European migration, the book maps the Jewish intellectual networks of Galicia and the Pale of Settlement, examining their impact on the formation of Jewish cultural and intellectual power centers at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In this issue: David Fialkoff | From Disqualifying Deeds to Disqualifying Thoughts: The Early Form of Mishnah Zevahim Elyashiv Cherlow | A Unique Cairo Genizah Manuscript of Babylonian Talmud Tractates Shevu’ot Idan Pinto | "Shulhan shel Arba" of R. Bahya ben Asher: Explorations into Its History and Several of Its Kabbalistic Sources Daniel Abrams | The Awareness of Scribes and Kabbalists to Multiple Versions of Texts in Kabbalistic Manuscripts

The book sheds light on the aims and achievements of the twelve first female members, who served in the first Israeli Knesset, and in particular on the perception of the status of women in the early years of the state. This study examines the heated debates that arose with the legislation of the following laws: the Marriage Age Law; the Income Tax Ordinance, which serves as a mirror of the status of the married woman; the Security Service Law, which can contribute to the understanding of Israeli society; and the Women’s Equal Rights Law of 1951, whose enactment concluded the work of the first Knesset. The influence of this legislation is felt to this day.

The Italian commedia dell’arte troupes roamed across Europe for two hundred years, captivating wide and diverse audiences. The performances of the commedia dell’arte were improvised, as the actors executed on stage a concise outline of a play, called "scenario". This book presents, for the first time in Hebrew translation, complete scenarios written by one of the greatest men of the Italian Renaissance theater, Flaminio Scala. The scenarios are accompanied by annotations and a comprehensive essay that reviews Scala’s life and work, and presents his scenario as a perfect recipe for comic improvisation. The book will therefore be of interest to theatre enthusiasts and scholars alike, and will provide directors, actors, and acting students with new and refreshing tools for staging comedies.

We are pleased to present readers with volume 23 of the journal Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and Jewish Languages . The present volume contains nine articles focusing on diverse facets of Jewish Languages, and on the traditions and features of Hebrew reflected in the varied genres cultivated in that language. Five of the articles deal with translations. Two of them concern Bible translations into Judeo-Arabic. Moshe Bar-Asher, who has analyzed and published widely on the Western šarḥ – that is, the Jewish Maghrebi translation of the Bible – examines euphemism and language refinement "in the face of danger" with respect to the šarḥ of the Pentateuchal books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. Tamar Zewi examines alternative translations in the Judeo-Arabic Tafsīr of R. Saadia Gaon on Exodus, on the basis of the excellent manuscript of the commentary, Yevr. II C1, housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Nahem Ilan discusses the Judeo-Arabic translation of the second part of the Hebrew work Pele Yo‘eṣ by Rabbi Eliezer Papo (Bulgaria, 1786–1827), composed in the middle of the 20th century by Rabbi Makhlouf Idan of Djerba. Yaffa Yisraeli analyzes the translation into the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Saqqiz (Iranian Kurdistan) of the noted piyyuṭ (liturgical poem) “Yashen al teradam,” by Rabbi Yehudah Halevy. Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers readers a comparative analysis of six Ladino translations of the description of the lover in Song of Songs, Chapter 5, representing both the Eastern and Western Ladino traditions, from the 16th–20th centuries. Assaf Ben-Moshe draws our attention to the linguistic diversity of the Jews of Iraq by comparing the divergences between the Judeo-Arabic variety used by the Jews of ˁĀna and that used by the Baghdad Jewish community. Dalit Assouline examines the Hebrew used by Mizrahi rabbis who joined the Breslav Hasidic sect, originally of Ashkenazic origin. Efraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah zooms in on another genre, the epistles exchanged by rabbinic scholars concerning books. Kedem Golden deals with Hebrew poetic riddles.

This volume is a jubilee book, celebrating with appreciation the work of Prof. Jonathan Cohen – a teacher, thinker, researcher, friend and loyal colleague – who is one of the central figures in the philosophy of Jewish education in our generation. The book is divided into five chapters. The first is dedicated to Cohen's character and his thought, and the other four chapters encompass topics at the core of his world: philosophical-literary discourse, the concept of translation between inside and outside, the transition from theory to educational practice, and dealing with the educational thought of others in light of his path. Some of the best contemporary Jewish education scholars have gathered here to offer a fascinating intellectual journey, which dwells, among other things, on the dialogue between tradition and innovation, textual study and pedagogy, universality and particularity. This collection of articles is unique in its combination of philosophical study and educational research rooted in the educational field. The original discussions it contains on key issues demonstrate from various angles the contribution of Prof. Cohen and his intellectual world to the philosophy of Jewish education. This collection is another important testament to the possibility of a practical philosophy that responds to the calls of the time, with all its challenges, and out of a deep sense of loyalty to education that looks at the human face and to Jewish tradition.