When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

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: Omri Livnat | From Masorah to Poetry, from Poetry to Masorah: on Saadia Gaon’s ‘Ohel Mekhon Binyanay’ Simcha Emanuel | A Collection of Laws from the German ' Genizah' Amir Boas | Kodesh Kodashim – An Annotated Critical Edition with an Introduction Noam Lev-El | ’Questions to the Sages of the Land of Israel’: Kabbalistic Responsa from the Mid-Sixteenth Century—Introduction and Edition

This is the story of an adventurous journey into a magical, unknown and incomprehensible world where nature is alive and has a psyche, including trees. Do trees have a spirit? Does a tree have a soul? Scientists may question the notion that trees have a mind, soul or spirit, but there are cultures where trees have a soul and a mind of their own. The book describes the mind-blowing experience of entry into a world of spirits and trees, a world of animism – the field of anthropology that ascribes a psyche to all natural elements. Written in the form of travel log accompanied by illustrations, the book reveals the wisdom and sensitivities of villagers in northern Burma, who opened their home, their trees and their hearts to the author, allowing him to touch and understand their beliefs, and through them understand his own self.

Although rabbinic compilations were composed hundreds of years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and despite differences in language, genre, and cultural setting, Dynamics of Midrashic Traditions seeks to demonstrate that both corpora preserve a common heritage, albeit replete with conflicting traditions and polemics. The integrative study carried out in this book sheds light on both corpora, paying special attention to the dynamics that shape and reshape the midrashic traditions throughout their transmission. The book deals with exegetical aspects incorporated in textual variants of the Bible, in Second Temple Literature (especially the "rewritten Bible", Sirach, Book of Jubilees, the Dead Sea scrolls, Hellenistic Jewish works, Philo of Alexandria), as well as passages of Paul and early Christian writers, scrutinizing them in tandem with parallels from rabbinic literature, Targum and ancient piyyutim . Among the themes discussed are the following: the knowledge of good and evil given to Adam; Abraham the monotheist; Moses’s death; Pesher and allegoristic interpretation; and halakhic issues in rabbinic literature and the Dead Sea scrolls. Table of Contents in English

According to the conventional understanding, the ultimate goal of Zionism as a national political movement was the establishment of a nation-state. In his new book on the history of the Zionist political imagination from the beginning of the idea of modern Zionism to the establishment of the State of Israel, Dimitri Shomsky challenges a deterministic view by examining unknown writings by the founding fathers of Zionism and by re-examining the known sources, which were interpreted in a tendentious and ahistorical way in the classical literature on Zionism. The author reveals that the leaders of Zionism envisioned the realization of Jewish self-determination in the Land of Israel within a multinational framework. First, they envisioned an autonomous province in the multinational Ottoman Empire, and then - during the British Mandate - a multinational democracy. The book shows that the models of a Jewish state, which were established and developed by the founding fathers of the State of Israel, included recognition of a collective national existence of the Arabs of the Land of Israel. Such political patterns were not the property of marginal figures among Zionists (such as the "Brit Shalom" people), but on the contrary, were presented by the most mainstream Zionists: Yehuda Leib Pinsker, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, Ahad Ha'am, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. The book focuses on these five figures and presents them and their views in an innovative way, which is known to have an impact on contemporary Israeli discourse.

Israel's recent constitutional political crisis marks the moment when civil duty becomes an existential question: are civilians obliged to obey an administration chosen in a democratic process, even if it means harm to justice, decency or elementary democratic values? The main claim made in this essay is that two types of civil disobedience are to be categorized: disobedience of law or policy, and disobedience of legality.

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.

When is a state authorized to demand of its civilians to sacrifice their lives in war? When is it authorized to demand of its soldiers to kill soldiers of an opposing army in war? According to politico-liberal theory, a state is authorized to oblige its civilians to participate only in a defensive war. However, some groups in Israel believe that a state is authorized to demand of its civilians to participate in a war of necessity, such as a war rooted in religious elements.

The Israel Folktale Archive (IFA), named after founder Dov Noy, was established in 1955 aiming to protect oral traditions at danger of becoming extinct or sinking into oblivion. It currently stores some 25,000 stories told in dozens of ethnic groups, mostly Jewish but also Muslim, Christian and Druze. Poetic Memory deals with the appearance of early Hebrew traditions in the archive tales, from the days of the Bible to the Middle Ages.

Empathy is often conceptualized as the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes. This experience comprises of a cognitive aspect – the ability to identify, understand and adopt the perspective of another, and an affective aspect – sharing the emotions of others, while remaining distinct. Empathy has been widely recognized as central to cognitive and social development, and a key to nurturing interpersonal relationships and encouraging pro-social action. But empathy has drawbacks as well: Its boundaries, limitations and even potential damage have also been recognized and investigated. The articles in this book take multiple perspectives to studying empathy. They discuss how empathy is developed and how it is bounded, and focus on both its positive and negative implications. The articles in the first part of the book take a social sciences perspective to empathy. They define empathy, describe its development from very early age and throughout the life-span, and examine how it affects intra-personal, interpersonal and social processes. The second part of the book discusses the role of empathy in the humanities. The articles in this part address empathy in history, literature and the arts. Together, the articles in this book point to the vast scope of empathy as a phenomenon in both the social sciences and the humanities.

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

The spread of the Assyrian Empire over the entire Fertile Crescent in the second half of the 8th century BC introduced various forms of cooperation between the neighboring nomadic Arabs and the imperial authorities. The geographical conditions and resultant lifestyle of the Arabs facilitated a mutual dependence and delicate equilibrium between themselves and the Assyrian rulers, eager to capitalize on their unprecedented regional might. Henceforth, the Arabs appear as an organic component of the Fertile Crescent history rather than mere desert raiders.