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.

A groundbreaking work, this book brings together philosophy of science and language, conceptual dynamics and the Babylonian Talmud. The work asks: what philosophy of natural language lies at the basis of the Halakhic dynamic in the Amoraic discourse of the Talmud? Calling upon two post-Wittgenstein philosophies, the book undertakes a search for a philosophical account of the discursive culture that appears in the Talmud. It unearths the normative infrastructure that lies at its core. Thus, this study articulates what can be termed the Talmudic philosophy of language. On the other hand, it reveals the limits and weaknesses of central philosophical frameworks in coping with a profound traditional discourse like the Talmud, in which the past has a deep and integral role in the present, while at the same time, the present has its own natural and creative dynamic.

Restorative justice is a social Mechanism used to replace or complement the criminal, legal process. It is designed to bring together offenders and victims, to meet in a safe and respectful environment in order to discuss the crime, the pain and suffering that it entailed - and look together for ways to repair these harms. Restorative Justice Conferences operate under state supervision and control. For over twenty years, restorative justice conferences have been practiced in Israel. Changes in the Israeli Youth Criminal Law have increased the number of such offender-victim conferences in recent years . Recent reforms in adult criminal justice law are also likely to encourage greater use of restorative justice conferences in cases of crimes conducted by adult, confessing offenders. Restorative justice theory and practices have facilitated and encouraged the emergence of Restorative Discourse programs. Such developments are important as they facilitate effective discussions and decision making among the different, sometime conflicting groups in Israel. Furthermore, restorative discourse promotes understanding between these groups and local and national authorities. Restorative Discourse enables people to discuss their exigencies, their wishes and preferences not only among themselves but with government agencies and officials as well. Such discourse is helpful and effective in improving the quality of life of individuals and communities in Israel. From Wrongdoing to Righting the Wrong is the first book addressing theoretical and practical aspects of Restorative Justice and Restorative Discourse in a unique Middle East context. The different chapters in this book were written by prominent scholars, practitioners and professionals who lead restorative justice and discourse programs in Israel.

Articles Dina Stein - Rabbinic Tales in the Israel Folktale Archives: Holy Men and Tricksters Osnat Sharon - Elephant, Leviathan and Nineveh the Great City: Sibbuv Rabbi Petachia and Midrash Yonah, Printed Side by Side Nina Pinto-Abecasis - The Piropo as a Bridge between Cultures in Tetuan (Northern Morocco) Adam Ratzon - Al ma yismash kbiru , ya alt tadbiru [Whoever would not listen to elders will not manage in life]: A Literary-Cultural Reading of the Proverbs and Personal Narratives of an Egyptian-Israeli Woman Jacqueline Laznow - ‘I didn’t know I wanted to be a rabbi, there was no name for what I wanted to be’: Life Stories of Women Rabbis Living in Israel Towards a History of Folklore Meir Nizri - Israel and the Sabbath as Bride and Groom in Various Sabbath Hymns

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 volume: Vered Raziel-Kretzmer, The Palestinian Morning Service in Fragments of an Early Liturgical Rotulus Amitai Harroch, The Liturgical Poems of Khalaf Bar Sa ʿ īd Ella Tovia, An Anonymous Exegesis of the Sifrei from the Europian Geniza Yacov Fuchs, Completing Leqaḥ Ṭov on the Qillirian Qerova ‘Zekhor Eikha Anu’ Y. Tzvi Langermann, ‘The Topic of Rosh Ḥodesh’— Chapter 18 of ‘Īssūr we-Hetēr’, an unpublished pre-Maimonidean Judeo-Arabic Halakhic Compendium Aviram Ravitsky, ‘The Principles of Qal va-Ḥomer’—New Material from the School of Rabbi Isaac Canpanton Dov Schwartz, A Philosophic and Kabbalistic Commentary on Psalm 29 by Rabbi Michael b. Shabtai Balbo Eli Gurfinkel, Rabbi David Ibn- Yaḥya’s Commentary to Maimonides’s Introduction of The Guide for the Perplexed

How did purity evolve into the one most significant religious category during the Second Temple period? What was the role of purity discourse in the reformation of Jewish society and religion in Late Antiquity? The concern for purity shaped Second Temple Judaism, and its significance expanded far beyond the limited realm of the Temple. The fear of impurity shaped daily conduct, stood at the heart of ideological discourse and set the contours of Jewish society. The question how to ensure ritual and moral purity was of cosmic dimensions, and therefore determined the dividing lines between the main parties of Jewish society in Palestine. The Qumran sect developed the notion of the defiling sin, and Jesus was viewed by his followers as the ultimate purifier. Against these alternatives, this book offers a comprehensive analysis of the purity policy in the teachings of the dominant Pharisees. Early rabbinic traditions alongside anti-pharisaic sources uncover a controversial policy focused on the body and not on the purity of the Temple. They provided purification to wider social circles, while preserving its role in maintaining their own status. The book further demonstrates the fundamental change of religious life and social practices from the Second Temple period through the rise of the rabbinic movement, which offered a new version of ritual purity and community. A close analysis of the halakhic traditions in rabbinic literature reveals the gradual disintegration of the ancient religious culture and the emergence of the rabbinic culture within new social contexts.

A great intellectual revolution took place in the Lithuanian Yeshivoth towards the end of the 19th century. The multitude of students who filled up the study halls, invested their time and energy to study the Talmud and its interpretations in a new study method, which focused on the legal sphere of the Talmud and advocated the development of analytical-conceptual way of thinking that facilitated more exact definitions of legal-halakhic norms and concepts in Talmudic literature. The main effort in the new method was no longer devoted to the interpretation of the textual level of the Talmudic debate, but to the understanding of the form of legal thinking which could be deduced from the Talmud, to the clarification of legal-halakhic concepts and to revealing the fundamental elements of the law. The successful combination of intensive study of Talmudic law and analytical scrutiny of legal concept turned the Lithuanian yeshivoth into "academies for Talmudic legal studies" and led to the development of "legal thinking". Rabbi Simeon Shkop (1859-1939) who was one of the most original and influential leaders of the Lithuanian yeshivoth, and a proponent of the new method. Rabbi Shkop upgraded the analytical examination of legal concepts, and in spite of the very individual nature of his method, his work is a faithful representation of the Lithuanian Yeshivoth as a whole. The first part of the book (chapters 1-2) includes a biography of Rabbi Shkop, and a historical review of the intellectual revolution that took place at the Lithuanian Yeshivoth . It also describes the exceptional characteristics of the new study method, and substantiates the claim that "legal thinking" was indeed developed in the Lithuanian Yeshivoth . The second part of the book (chapters 3-5) deals with a number of topics from the comprehensive works of Rabbi S. Shkop, and analyze them with jurisprudential instruments. The research method was based on a combination of historical and jurisprudential aspects, and the book is readily comprehensible for the educated reader without legal training or a Yeshiva background.

The book Mah Nishtannah: The Passover Night in the Sages' Discourse seeks to provide novel answers, based upon up-to-date methods of scholarly Talmud analysis, to ancient questions raised by the Seder Night, a night at the focus of Jewish culture from time immemorial. The book analyzes the focal points of this night – the Passover meal and its commandments on one hand, and the foundation of the Haggadah and the development of its design and history of its structure on the other.

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 jobs on account of their scholastic or rhetorical skills, their family ties, or because they had the capital to buy these positions? Were their positions permanent 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 were their relationships 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 a world of over one thousand rabbis.

The present comprehensive and orderly collection of texts from the Babylonian Talmud allows a deep insight into the knowledge of the rabbis about the importance and decryption of dream experiences and dream messages. It covers, inter alia, the emergence of dreams and their healing power, mysterious Atonement and possibilities of influencing the content of a dream, nightmares, dream and prophecy, sexual dreams, rules and techniques of dream interpretation. The Talmudic texts are added through detailed explanations and contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish parallels. This book was first published in Vienna in 1923. It is Kristianpollers' thesis, written in his 20s. The thesis was finished as a book in 1914 but publication was delayed due to the first world war. The Hebrew translation was initiated by the authors' son, Professor Nahum Kristianpoller, in memory of his parents who perished in the Holocaust.

The discovery of the Cairo Geniza has transformed scholarly research in multiple areas of Jewish Studies and revolutionized several disciplines. It has provided the materials for thousands of studies and is by no means exhausted. Alongside the Cairo Geniza, an additional "Geniza" is slowly emerging in Europe, one that consists of many thousands of individual pages that were torn from Hebrew manuscripts hundreds of years ago and subsequently used for bookbinding and as folders for archive files. Although the first fruits of the European Geniza appeared considerably before the discovery of its Cairo counterpart, this "European Geniza" has not been at the center of scholarly interest, and relatively few scholars have made use of it. However, in recent decades thousands of new fragments have come to light, increasing the quantity previously known to us exponentially. Hidden Treasures from Europe seeks to bring the European Geniza to the forefront of scholarly research. Chapter One is an extensive and detailed introduction to the nature of this Geniza. The heart of the book, Chapters Two through Twelve, comprises the first publication of eleven important texts found in the European Geniza that are not extant in published editions or in whole manuscripts. These were carefully chosen from among a much broader range of previously unknown texts that were preserved in the European Geniza. Half of these compositions are Bible commentaries (Section I, Chapters Two–Six), and the other half are commentaries to the Talmud (Section II, Chapters Seven–Twelve). Most were composed in France, Germany, or Italy, while the country of origin of one early work, Sefer efeî, has yet to be determined.

In his own estimation, Maimonides was neither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devoted rabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single, harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental to the lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidson examines Maimonides’ efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalist worldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile. Maimonides was not the first rabbinic scholar to take an interest in philosophy, but he was unique in being a towering figure in both areas. His law code, the Mishneh torah, stands with Rashi's commentary on the Babylonian Talmud as one of the two most intensely studied rabbinic works coming out of the Middle Ages, while his Guide for the Perplexed is the most influential and widely read Jewish philosophical work ever written. Admirers and critics have arrived at wildly divergent perceptions of the man. We have Maimonides the atheist or agnostic, Maimonides the sceptic, Maimonides the deist, Maimonides the Aristotelian, the Averroist, or proto-Kantian. We have a Maimonides seduced by the blandishments of 'accursed philosophy'; a Maimonides who sowed the seeds that led to Spanish Jews' loss of faith and mass apostasy and who was therefore responsible for the demise of Spanish Jewry; a Maimonides who incorporated philosophical elements into his rabbinic works and wrote the Guide for the Perplexed not to propagate doctrines to which he was personally committed but in order to rescue errant souls seduced by philosophy; a Maimonides who was the defender of the faith and defined the articles of Jewish belief for all time. In his own estimation, Maimonides was neither exclusively a dedicated philosopher nor exclusively a devoted rabbinist: he saw philosophy and the Written and Oral Torahs as a single, harmonious domain, and he believed that this view was similarly fundamental to the lives of the prophets and rabbis of old. In this book, Herbert Davidson examines Maimonides’ efforts to reconstitute this all-embracing, rationalist worldview that he felt had been lost during the millennium-long exile.