The Book Smugglers is the nearly unbelievable story of ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts—first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets—by hiding them on their bodies, burying them in bunkers, and smuggling them across borders. It is a tale of heroism and resistance, of friendship and romance, and of unwavering devotion—including the readiness to risk one’s life—to literature and art. And it is entirely true. Based on Jewish, German, and Soviet documents, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and the author’s interviews with several of the story’s participants, The Book Smugglers chronicles the daring activities of a group of poets turned partisans and scholars turned smugglers in Vilna, “The Jerusalem of Lithuania.” The rescuers were pitted against Johannes Pohl, a Nazi “expert” on the Jews, who had been dispatched to Vilna by the Nazi looting agency, Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, to organize the seizure of the city’s great collections of Jewish books. Pohl and his Einsatzstab staff planned to ship the most valuable materials to Germany and incinerate the rest. The Germans used forty ghetto inmates as slave-laborers to sort, select, pack, and transport the materials, either to Germany or to nearby paper mills. This group, nicknamed “the Paper Brigade,” and informally led by poet Shmerke Kaczerginski, a garrulous, street-smart adventurer and master of deception, smuggled thousands of books and manuscripts past German guards. If caught, the men would have faced death by firing squad at Ponar, the mass-murder site outside of Vilna. To store the rescued manuscripts, poet Abraham Sutzkever helped build an underground book-bunker sixty feet beneath the Vilna ghetto. Kaczerginski smuggled weapons as well, using the group’s worksite, the former building of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, to purchase arms for the ghetto’s secret partisan organization. All the while, both men wrote poetry that was recited and sung by the fast-dwindling population of ghetto inhabitants. With the Soviet “liberation” of Vilna (now known as Vilnius), the Paper Brigade thought themselves and their precious cultural treasures saved—only to learn that their new masters were no more welcoming toward Jewish culture than the old, and the books must now be smuggled out of the USSR.

Articles in this issue: Noam Mizrahi | The Eleventh Song of the Sabbath Sacrifice: Literary Form and Exegetical Content Tanja Werthmann | 'You Know the DIfference between a Lover (Oheb) and a Passionate Lover (Hosheq)': Degrees of Love in Maimonides and His Source in al-Ghazali Judith Weiss | Kababalah in Gerona in the Thirteenth Century: Azriel and Nahmanides. A Re-Evaluation Tsippi Kauffman | R. Boruch of Medzhybizh and the 'Medzhybizh Dynasty' English Abstracts

The book traces contested visions and representations of al-Andalus/Sepharad in modern Jewish discourse through an in-depth analysis of the work of Sephardi intellectual network in the turn of the twentieth century Palestine/Land of Israel. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous political and social events of that period, and processes of national, ethnic, and religious partitions, the book explores the ways in which these Sephardi intellectuals fundamentally challenged the nationalistic and monolingual ideologies and looks at their efforts to establish a shared Jewish-Arab society based on a symbolic return to the Sephardi/Andalusian medieval legacy of Hebrew-Arabic bilingualism and a Judeo-Muslim joint cultural heritage. By exploring these contested representations of Sephardi identity and culture the book re-examines some fundamental issues that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and which still accompany us to this day: the national conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the contacts and splits between Hebrew and Arab culture and the formation of ethnic hierarchies between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim. The book aims to contribute to the growing interest in modern Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewish history and to broaden the scope of “Jewish studies” beyond the European Jewish experience.

These two collections of Yiddish letters date from the second half of the 17th century and are being published here in full for the first time. The opening five-letter collection was archived together with extensive information about three Jews from Hamburg-Altona, who had been arrested and investigated in Copenhagen in August 1666. The second collection consists of eighteen letters exchanged between Hamburg-Altona and Copenhagen in January 1678. They concern the family and business affairs of a range of people, among them some of Glikl Hamel’s relatives, business associates and acquaintances. Together, the two collections provide a wealth of illuminating new details about the economic, cultural, social, and family life of early modern Ashkenazi Jews in Northern Europe, and also shed light on the practice of Yiddish letter-writing at the time. The English section consists of an introduction followed by a synopsis of each letter, while the Hebrew section comprises a transcription of the original texts as well as their facsimile images.

Sephardi identity has meant different things at different times, but has always entailed a connection with Spain, from which the Jews were expelled in 1492. While Sephardi Jews have lived in numerous cities and towns throughout history, certain cities had a greater impact in the shaping of their culture. This book focuses on those that may be considered most important, from Cordoba in the tenth century to Toledo, Venice, Safed, Istanbul, Salonica, and Amsterdam at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Each served as a venue in which a particular dimension of Sephardi Jewry either took shape or was expressed in especially intense form. Significantly, these cities were mostly heterogeneous in their population and culture—half of them under Christian rule and half under Muslim rule—and this too shaped the Sephardi world-view and attitude. While Sephardim cultivated a distinctive identity, they felt at home in the cultures of their adopted lands. Drawing upon a variety of both primary and secondary sources, Jane Gerber demonstrates that Sephardi history and culture have always been multifaceted. Her interdisciplinary approach captures the many contexts in which the life of the Jews from Iberia unfolded, without either romanticizing the past or diluting its reality.

The enigmatic kabbalist Samuel Falk, known as the Ba’al Shem of London, has piqued the curiosity of scholars for generations. Eighteenth-century London was fascinated by Jews, and as a miracle-worker and adventurer, well connected and well read, Falk had much to offer. Interest in the man was further aroused by rumours of his dealings with European aristocrats and other famous characters, as well as with scholars, Freemasons, and Shabbateans, but evidence was scanty. Michal Oron has now brought together all the known source material on the man, and her detailed annotations of his diary and that of his assistant give us rich insights into his activities over several years. We learn of his meetings and his travels; his finances; his disputes, his dreams, and his remedies; and lists of his books. We see London’s social life and commerce, its landed gentry and its prisons, and what people ate, wore, and possessed. The burgeoning Jewish community of London and its religious practices, as well as its communal divisiveness, is depicted especially colourfully. The scholarly introductions by Oron and by Todd Endelman and the informative appendices help contextualize the diaries and offer an intriguing glimpse of Jewish involvement in little-known aspects of London life at the threshold of the modern era.

The Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish composition of greatest scope, and its influence on Jewish life is decisive. Jewish sages have devoted more time and energy to its study and halakhic interpretation than to any other book, including the Bible, to the extent that "talmud Torah," Torah study, is mainly perceived as the study of the Babylonian Talmud. Its academic study, in contrast, is still in its initial stages. Critical editions, with the text based on the best manuscripts and an exhaustive and thorough critical commentary, have been published of only a few of the thirty-seven tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. Central questions pertaining to the manner of the formulation of the Talmud, its redaction, and its transmission are still unresolved. This is different from the state of research of other Rabbinic works, the study of which has taken significant strides in recent decades. Critical, balanced, and cautious interpretation of talmudic sugyot (discursive units) will likely illustrate the treasures to be revealed by a scholarly reading of the Babylonian Talmud: illuminating new facets of which traditional study is unaware; the consistent presentation of its meticulous literary fashioning, its contentual depth, and the creative force embodied in this corpus. All these find expression even in sugyot that seem tenuous and bothersome to the traditional student. Tiqqun Olam (Repairing the World) seeks to advance the research of the Babylonian Talmud with an annotated edition of the fourth chapter of Tractate Gittin, which contains various regulations that were enacted "for tiqqun olam." This chapter was chosen for the wide variety of its topics and the redactive methods employed, and for the benefit to be gained from their critical analysis. The widespread study of this chapter in high schools and yeshivot also influences its selection, in the hope it will aid both students and scholars in highlighting his difficulties and in exposing the overt and covert trends of the Amoraim and the redactors of the sugyot. The first chapter of this book examines the meanings of the term "tiqqun olam" in the Mishnah and the Tosefta, along with the structure of the tannaitic units containing regulations "for the repairing of the world" in these two tannaitic works. The main body of the book contains a systematic discussion of these mishnayot and sugyot, using philological-historical methodology, alongside the literary analysis, which has not been sufficiently developed in talmudic research to now. The talmudic text is divided into forty-nine sugyot. For each the book offers a new text based on MS. Firkovich 187, a list of parallels, a selection of textual variants and discussion of their originality, and a commentary. The commentary includes a detailed explanation of the sugyot and an analysis of their strata. A unique attempt is made to glean from within the traces of the difficulties within the sugyot and the dissonance they exhibit the aims of the redactors, who frequently formulated new laws, while devoting sophisticated literary effort in order to mask these innovations, and to impart to the sugyah a harmonious composition. In this book, much effort was invested to reveal the plain meaning of the Talmud, employing the tools of scholarly research - which, for various reasons, are not integrated into the widespread study of the Talmud today. The book undertakes to open a window to the academic world and its methodology, to enable Talmud students to come to know the world of Babylonian Talmud scholarship that is both demanding and profound, but also intriguing, while offering new insights.

This issue contains the following essays: Amit Gvaryahu | The Tannaitic Laws of Battery: Scripture and Halakhah Uzi Leibner | The End of the Amoraic Period in the Land of Israel: Periodization, History and Archaeology Yoel Kretzmer-Raziel | The Talmudic Stam as an Evolutionary Phenomenon: The Opening Sugyot of Tractate Nedarim in the Talmud Yerushalmi and the Talmud Bavli Gal Sofer | Lover, Son and Prophet: Magic and Kabbalah in the Autobiography of Yohanan Alemanno English Abstracts

Isaac ben Samuel of Dampierre, often known as Ri ha-Zaken, was a leading figure in the Tosafist movement. The Tosafists were active in Northern France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their dialectical approach to interpretation of the Talmud and other classic rabbinic texts created a revolution in Jewish intellectual life. This volume gathers, for the first time, 140 responsa written by Isaac of Dampierre in response to questions of practical law and legal interpretation. Each responsum was edited according to the most accurate manuscripts, with a critical apparatus and extensive historical and textual notes. The introduction explores Isaac of Dampierre’s life and thought as they emerge from the responsa.

This study delves into Israeli political life in 1947–1952, focusing on several main emphases: the crucial moment when statehood was decided upon, the election campaign for the Constitutional Assembly (which transformed itself into the First Knesset), Israel’s struggle for de facto and de jure American recognition, and Chaim Weizmann’s term as Israel’s first president.

Contiruptance: Poetical Fluctuations in Naomi Frankel’s Work is the first book dedicated to Frankel's literary work, offering an in-depth reading of her entire fictional oeuvre. The concept of "Contiruptance," which indicates ruptures and continuity, provides insight into Frankel's poetics; suggesting that it may serve to deepen the analysis of the works of other authors.