Chaim Waxman, the pre-eminent sociologist of contemporary Orthodoxy, is one of the keenest observers of American Jewish society. Having written on various aspects of this subject over the past forty years, he now revisits his earlier work in the light of recent developments. His familiarity with the entire spectrum of the Orthodox world combined with his deep knowledge of halakhah and his rigorous command of statistical and demographic data enables him to articulate distinctive perspectives on the issues that he addresses. His focus is not only on the various directions in which Orthodox practice is moving but also on how this affects the community as a whole. Waxman’s range is wide. After reviewing the socio-economic changes in American Orthodox communities and examining the reasons for them, he goes on to consider the political patterns of contemporary American Orthodox Jews. Demographic changes are also explored, particularly those relating to family life. Moving to the communal level, he discusses the increasing Americanization of Orthodox Jews, taking special note of how developments in Orthodoxy in Israel are having an increasing impact on American norms as contact between the two communities grows. In illustration of how Orthodoxy is adapting to modernity, he then presents a detailed discussion of halakhic developments, particularly regarding women’s greater participation in ritual practices and other areas of communal life. He shows that the direction of change is not uniform: there is both greater stringency and greater leniency, and he discusses the many reason for this both in the Jewish community and in the wider society. Relations between the various sectors of American Orthodoxy over the past several decades are also considered. The result is a comprehensive analysis from an acknowledged expert that will be of interest to everyone concerned with developments within American Orthodoxy and with the sociology of religion more generally.

The ‘Jewish mother’ figure is a hallmark of Jewish culture, one which appears in the works of rabbis, artists, poets, and activists across time and place. While depictions of mothers and motherhood abound in Jewish writings, they vary significantly according to social context. These representations therefore offer important insights into the Jewish cultural imagination, and the ways in which writers resort to the figure of the Jewish mother to comprehend and construct their world. The contributors to this volume highlight the complex network of symbols and images associated with Jewish mothers and motherhood as well as the vast array of social, historical, and cultural patterns that characterizations of mothers reflect. Each essay treats the topic from a specific perspective, spanning from mother--daughter relationships in the Talmud to depictions of mothers in twentieth-century American Jewish children’s literature. Collectively, they present a provocative examination of the ways mothers shape and problematize Jewish identity. This volume seeks to give the figure of the mother a new and enhanced place at the heart of Judaism: not only as a central figure in family life, but also as a key agent in the transmission of Jewish religion and culture.

AMILAT se honra en presentar el séptimo volumen de su serie Judaica Latinoamericana , que incluye una amplia selección de los trabajos presentados en la Sección América Latina del XV Congreso Mundial de Estudios Judaicos (Jerusalén 2009), por investigadores establecidos en las Américas e Israel, especializados en diversas disciplinas de las humanidades y las ciencias sociales. El volumen enfoca una variedad de temas pertenecientes a las experiencias históricas, sociales y culturales del judaísmo en América Latina, tanto respecto de lo que poseen en común como en cuanto a sus diferencias debidas a los diversos contextos nacionales. A ello se suman renovadoras propuestas metodológicas, necesarias en vista de fenómenos socio-culturales recientes originados en la globalización y el transnacionalismo, que se proyectan hacia el futuro de las investigaciones en el área.

Given the availability of literal commentaries to the Bible, including those of Rashi, R. Joseph Kara, Samuel Ben Meir (Rashbam), R. Abraham Ibn Ezra and others, one of the key questions that vexed R. Joseph Bekhor Shor and his contemporaries was whether there was a need for yet another additional Bible commentary. The argument put forward here suggests that R. Joseph Bekhor Shor chose a path that combined continuity and innovation. The fluid movement between the familiar and the novel is the main contribution of R . Joseph Bekhor Shor's exegesis. While remaining committed to the traditional approach to interpretation, R. Joseph Bekhor Shor succeeded in paving new pathways and introducing original methods that had not previously been developed by his predecessors . This book serves as a vital tool for researchers of the Bible commentaries of Northern France, for those who study the teachings of R. Joseph Bekhor Shor and for all who enjoy studying the Bible and its commentaries .

The heroes of this book are the rabbis of small and medium-sized communities in Eastern Europe. Who were these rabbis? What were their training processes? Did they get their job because of their scholastic or rhetorical skills, because of their family ties, or because they had the capital to buy this position? Did they win "permanence" or was the threat of dismissal constantly hovering over their heads? How were their terms of employment and wages determined, and what was their economic situation? Were they perceived as spiritual leaders? What was their relationship with the community's power centers? How did they navigate between their duties as halakhic authorities and their desire to engage in learning and teaching? The book attempts to answer these questions based on an examination of the world of over a thousand rabbis. Click here for the English edition, published by De Gruyter in collaboration with Magnes Press

According to common opinion, in the research of Jewish law and in the Halakhic literature, transactions in incorporeal estates are non-valid. However, economic life and the business world are based on these transactions. As a result, a gap was created between Halacha and reality. The book " Out of Nothing" proposes resolving this problem through Talmudic research methods, various issues which are discussed in the Talmudic law, including Davar She'lo Ba La'olam , Tovat Hanaha , and bills sale. In the course of the discussion it turns out that the Tannaitic ruling recognized these transactions, but Talmudic Halakha refused to recognize them. However, the Amoraim suggest various ways of mediation in order to enable transferring of future estate, debt bonds and so on. The book proposes to take the bridges that the Amoraim proposed based on the Tannaitic law and to use them as tools for Halakhic validation of current market life.

One of the most visible aspects of Orthodox Judaism in present-day Israel is the ubiquity of the "Gdoilim" – "the great ones" - the luminary spiritual leaders whose presence dominates orthodox politics, media and the public space. However, these individuals, whose lives are constantly canonized in hagiographies, have largely remained unknown outside the Orthodox Jewish communities, and have generally been overlooked by the academic research. The 'Gdoilim': Individuals who shaped Haredi Judaism in Israel is a pioneering attempt to fill this gap by offering a comprehensive collection of articles by Israeli and American leading scholars of Orthodox Judaism striving to elucidate the lives and theologies of these extraordinary individuals and explain the secret of their lasting power.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Three Ways to Be Alien draws on the lives and writings of three figures cast adrift from their traditional moorings into an unknown world. The subjects includea "Persian" prince of Bijapur (in central India, no less) held hostage by the Portuguese at Goa; English traveler and global schemer, whose writings reveal a surprisingly nimble understanding of realpolitik in the emerging world of the early seventeenth century; and an insightful Venetian chronicler of the Mughal Empire in the later seventeenth century who drifted between jobs with the Mughals and various foreign entrepôts, observing all but remaining the eternal outsider. In telling the fascinating story of floating identities in a changing world, Subrahmanyam also succeeds in injecting humanity into global history and proves that biography still plays an important role in contemporary historiography.

Most of the nineteen essays presented in this book deal with tongues and traditions of Maghreb Judaism. The communities of Morocco are a central topic in this collection as well as essays dealing with documents from the Ghardaïa community in south Algeria. This collection also offers extensively studied records of practices and actions of other communities in the area. Most of the chapters are based on manuscripts and records from the collection of Jewish North-African manuscripts at the Yale University library. The first two parts of the appendix are dedicated to four Masoretes. Bar-Asher based quite a few of his researches on their spoken and written Masoretic texts.

The present volume 23 of Korot has as main topics, first, embryology in Jewish and ancient Middle Eastern sources, and second, medicine in the Holocaust. The section on embryology consists of six articles, four of which were presented in a symposium entitled “On Fetuses, Infants and everything in-between through the Ages,” which was held at the Van Leer Institute on March 30, 2015. The meeting was sponsored by the Israel Society for the History of Medicine and by Korot, and organized by Dr. Israela Nili. Three of the papers concentrate on ancient Mesopotamia: Dr. Couto-Ferreira describes embryological data in Akkadian and Sumerian texts, Prof. Klein expounds embryological issues in the omen literature, and Prof. Fleishman discusses some of the legal aspects of parenthood. Prof. Cohen analyzes the influence of Septuagint translation in the debate concerning abortion. Two additional papers deal with later Hellenistic sources: Prof. Kottek and Dr. Paavilainen discuss the contribution of Philo the Alexandrian and Prof. van der Horst examines Hellenistic Christian sources, respectively. The section on the Holocaust includes three studies. Dr. van den Ende’s paper describes the ethical dilemmas faced by the Jewish doctors in Holland during the Nazi occupation. It was first presented in the workshop of the 15th Nahariya Conference on Medicine and the Holocaust (May 6, 2015), convened by Prof. Shaul Shasha. Dr. Schwoch deals with the same issue from the point of view of the Jewish Krankenbehandler in Germany. Dr. Offer’s bibliographical review, the first part of which has been published in Korot, volume 22, describes the development of academic research in Jewish medicine in the Holocaust from the third decade after the Holocaust until the first decade of the 21st century. The rest of the articles presented in this volume concentrate on the life and work of several Jewish physicians, the only exception being Prof. Nissan’s paper on hybrid animals in Jewish sources. Prof. McDonald analyzes the story of the Jewish personal physician of Charles the Bald, accused by later authors of having poisoned the king. Prof. Gath discusses a similar topic: Jan III Sobieski and his Jewish physician, who was later blamed for having caused his death. Dr. Nevins casts new light on the mystery of Vesalius’ Jewish friend and adviser in Hebrew medical terms. Prof. Shḥori-Rubin’s work on Dr. Fanny Lvova continues her series of articles on Jewish pioneer women doctors. Dr. Paavilainen describes Isaac Israeli’s way of diagnosing the complex symptoms of consumption. Prof. Freudenthal summarizes the different pressures affecting medieval Jewish physicians and explains on the basis of a contemporary source why science did not thrive among the Jewish scholars of Provence. The volume is, as usual, bilingual (12 articles in English, 4 in Hebrew), with contributions from Spain, Holland, Germany, Britain, USA, France, and of course Israel.

Strasbourg, Paris, Jerusalem - The Renewal of French Jewish Thought Le renouveau dont il est question dans ce 23e numéro de Perspectives porte sur la pensée juive française au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et au cours des années qui suivirent. Trois villes : Strasbourg, Paris, Jérusalem furent les foyers actifs de ce renouveau et s’illustrèrent avec des penseurs comme Jacob Gordin, Levinas, André Neher ou Manitou-Léon Askénazi. Hommage leur est rendu dans la première partie de ce volume tandis que la seconde présente quelques-uns de leurs héritiers.

Historiography formed an unusually important component of the popular culture and heritage of east European Jewry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was a period of social, economic, and political upheaval, and for the emerging class of educated Jews the writing and reading of Jewish history provided not only intellectual but also emotional and moral sustenance. Facing an insecure future became easier with an understanding of the past, and of the Jewish place in that past. This volume is devoted to the development of Jewish historiography in the three east European centers—Congress Poland, the Russian empire, and Galicia—that together contained the majority of world Jewry at that time. Drawing widely on the multilingual body of scholarly and popular literature that emerged in that turbulent environment, the contributors to this volume attempt to go beyond the established paradigms in the study of Jewish historiography, and specifically to examine the relationship between the writing of Jewish history and of non-Jewish history in eastern Europe. In doing so they expose the tension between the study of the Jewish past in a communal setting and in a wider, regional, setting that located Jews firmly in the non-Jewish political, economic, and cultural environment. They also explore the relationship between ‘history’—seen as the popular understanding of the past—and ‘scholarly history’—interpretation of the past through the academic study of the sources, which lays claim to objectivity and authority. The development of Jewish historical scholarship grew out of the new intellectual climate of the Haskalah, which encouraged novel modes of thinking about self and others and promoted critical enquiry and new approaches to traditional sources. At the same time, however, in response to what the traditionalists perceived as secular research, an Orthodox historiography also emerged, driven not only by scholarly curiosity but also by the need to provide a powerful counterweight in the struggle against modernity. In fact, east European Jewish historiography has undergone many methodological, thematic, and ideological transformations over the last two centuries. Even today, east European Jewish historiography revisits many of the questions of importance to scholars and audiences since its emergence: how Jews lived, both within the narrow Jewish world and in contact with the wider society; the limits of Jewish insularity and integration; expressions of persecution and anti-Jewish violence; and also Jewish contributions to the societies and states of eastern Europe. Many challenges still remain: questions of the purpose of the research, its ideological colouring, and its relevance for contemporary Jewish communities. The fruit of research in many disciplines and from different methodological points of view, this volume has much to offer scholars of modern Jewry trying to understand how east European Jews saw themselves as they struggled with the concepts of modernity and national identity and how their history continues to be studied and discussed by an international community of scholars.