Articles in this issue: Menahem Kahana | The Tosafot (‘Marginal Annotations’) in Sifre on Deuteronomy Omri Livnat | Discoveries from Constantine: New Liturgical Poems by Yosef Ibn Avitur and Evidence of the Inclusion of Byzantine Poems in a North African Maḥzor Omer Michaelis | Ṣūfī Terminology and Its Meaning in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed Jonatan Howard | The System of Exceptions: On the Organizational Structure of Grammatical Knowledge in Medieval Ashkenaz

This book focuses on space, borders and ethics in contemporary Hebrew prose written in the shadow of the Occupation and the Intifadas and reads a corpus of works written between 1987 and 2007. Israeli literary representations of the Occupation and the two Intifadas raise critical ethical questions about militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and its borders, the nature of Zionist education, and the acknowledgment of the Other. The book deals with the portrait of the Israeli soldier, depicts the settings of the Occupied Territories, but also describes life in cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It examines realistic writing as well as fantastic-grotesque, in the works of A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Ronit Matalon, Asher Kravitz, Michal Govrin, and Orly Castel-Bloom and many others.

Zionists without Borders tells the story of the Halutz movement in Poland and its role in helping the Labor movement rise to the leadership of the Zionist Movement in the interwar period. It describes the founding of a mass national and socialist movement, which changed the face of the Zionist map. The leaders of the Labor movement in Israel established strong ties with pioneers from Poland, thus making the Halutz a cross-border movement, connecting Jews by means of politics, nationalism and socialism.

During the last decades there have occurred significant upheavals in the political and military position of many religious and ethnic communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Communities which had been rejected and discriminated for decades rose to power or strengthened their political position in their countries by means of military struggles. Meanwhile, in Israel/Palestine, the ethnical-religious Jewish minority has become a ruling majority, while excluding the former Arab-Muslim-Sunni majority, following the wars of 1948 and 1976. This book examines these processes.

Commedia dell’arte, originating in Italy and proliferating on European stages from approximately 1650 to 1750, is one of the most significant and long-lasting phenomena in theatre history; its influence on all performing genres is notable throughout Western Drama to this very day. The new study From Carnival to Theatre: Structure and Chaos in the Commedia Dell'arte provides a comprehensive, deeply-researched study of the development of the genre, the establishment of the first professional troupes in Europe, their organization, their patrons and wide variety of popular and elite audiences. The study traces all aspects of the unique improvised performance: the show's space, dramatic patterns, dramatis personae, acting style, costume and stage design are re-interpreted by the attachment of the commedia dell’ arte to its double roots: the heritage of written literature, and manifestations of popular oral tradition in seasonal festivities. The book explores especially the interaction of the commedia dell'arte with the phenomenon of carnival, in its very existence as an opposition to the social structure within the liminal time and space related to the celebration. Being an authorized event, containing metaphors of annihilating the existent order, in which subversion could be substituted by amusement, the carnivalesque combined time, place and creative means into a new theatrical form: the commedia dell'arte.

Question of Place: Architecture between the Poetic and the Ethical calls for a re-understanding of the foundations of the architectural act while exposing it to phenomenological thought. Through a return to the first - and failed - encounter in the late 1970s, between phenomenology depicting phenomena in the light of human experience and architectural discourse, Edna Langenthal offers a new reading of discourse, embracing the thought of philosopher Martin Heidegger and discussing the influence of the architectural theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz, who in her opinion missed Heidegger's contribution to her understanding. To emphasize the potential inherent in Heidegger's thought in understanding the question of place and the possibilities of dwelling in it, the author discusses the meaning of the poetic as a constitutive axis in understanding key concepts in contemporary architectural discourse. But the poetic dimension, for her, cannot exist without the ethical dimension. Through a study of the thought of Heidegger's student and critic, the philosopher Emanuel Levinas, the structure that connects an affinity between the ethical and the home and the possibilities of settling in it.

The Second Commandment’s injunction against making graven images and likenesses resonates in all facets of Jewish visuality throughout the generations. Although Jews have always created and consumed art, the attitude to figural art –anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representations – has oscillated, like a pendulum, between strict prohibition and full permissibility. Figureless Art traces a lesser-known chapter in the history of Jewish art – a period governed by the swing to extreme stringency that left its mark on Late Antique synagogues in the Land of Israel. This anti-figural trend manifested in the avoidance of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic depictions and in the deliberate obliteration of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures on stone carvings and mosaic carpets that adorned the synagogues. What is the meaning of this strict trend? Did it emerge from within the Jewish world or was it stimulated, conversely, by external influences? Who was responsible for the effacement of the figures in the synagogues and when did these iconoclastic events occur? This book examines these phenomena through a broad historical, religious, and cultural perspective, based on visual and literary sources from Late Antique and early Muslim Palestine.

The book seeks to understand resistance as a meeting point among various political streams that operate in Lebanon and the development of resistance from military action into a project which is beyond culture in the narrow sense, into a hegemony that encompasses all sides of life. The book links the historical development of the Lebanese political system together with the many years of radical Shi'ite political thought in the entire Middle East region, with an emphasis on the influence of leftist and revolutionary secular thought on Shi'ite radical thought in general and that of Hezbollah in particular. The book reviews the various "hegemonic mechanisms" through which Hezbollah rules its hegemony over Lebanon. A hegemony that is not (only) a result of coercion by force, but also (mostly) the result of dominating the discourse of resistance on the Lebanese and regional arena in general.

Therapeutics and Salvation: Freud and Schelling on Freedom proposes a new conceptual perspective on the history of the philosophy of freedom. The book focuses on Sigmund Freud’s theory of freedom, and its fundamental, yet uncharted, connection with the groundbreaking philosophy of the unconscious of F.W.J Schelling. The analysis radically challenges conventional liberal and rationalistic conceptions of freedom in psychoanalysis. The main argument of the book is that Freud formulated his theory of human nature with Schelling’s basic philosophical architecture, in particular Schelling’s concept of freedom, but, at the same time, subverted Schelling’s search for a new theology at the end of the latter's philosophical career. The detailed comparison of Freud’s work with the philosophy of Schelling backtracks a momentous shift from Schelling’s late theo-philosophy, at the endpoint of German Idealism, to the secular system of Freud, in which human reality ousted godly revelation and therapeutics replaced divine salvation. By delineating the move from Schelling’s God-subject relations to Freud’s human-subject relations, the book offers a new perspective on the historical evolution of German Idealism into modern secular thought.

This research project tries, for the first time, to analyze and compare all the key Spanish Jewish apostates, especially Petrus Alfonsi, Abner of Burgos, Geronimo de Santa Fe, Pablo de Santa Maria and Pedro de la Caballeria. The aim of this research is to understand the ideological background of the mass conversion of the Spanish Jewish community from the perspective of the intellectual elite involved in the conversion itself and not – as has usually been the case in modern scholarship – according to the rabbis who decided to stay Jewish. In the first part of the book, the author explains the impact of the conversion of a part of the Jewish intellectual elite on the Spanish Jewish population. In the second part, he examines the opinion of the various ideological converts regarding Christianity (especially the dogmas of the Trinity and Incarnation). In the third part, he analyzes their criticisms of Judaism. The main conclusion of this research is that there is a very important difference between the various converso intellectuals regarding the essence of Christianity. The conversos who were philosophers or kabbalists before their conversion continued with a similar approach even after their conversion, using their former philosophical/kabbalistic knowledge to try to convince their fellow Jews to convert as they had. The common denominator of the different writings of these apostates is not their opinions on Christianity but rather their similar criticisms of Judaism, and especially with regard to keeping Jewish religious obligations.

Chronicle of French and Ottoman Kings was written by a sixteenth-century Jewish doctor of Spanish origin living in Italy. According to the writer, his intention was to document the hardships and injustices suffered by Jews in the Diaspora - especially the expulsion of Jews from Spain and France - and include them in the history of the conflict between the French kinds and Ottoman Empire over the rule in "the land of Judea and Jerusalem." In effect, this is a story, set in chronological order, of selected events in world history, similar in structure and content to hundreds of writings published at the time. It was written in fine biblical Hebrew, and as such was aimed at an audience who knew the language and could appreciate the conflict between the French kings and the Ottoman Empire as representing world history.