This issue contains the following essays: Assaf and Ishay Rosen-Zvi | Tannaitic Halakhic and Aggadic Methodology Yakir Paz | ‘Binding Crowns to the Letters’ – A Divine Scribal Practice in Its Historical Context Avishai Bar-Asher | Illusion versus Reality in the Study of Early Kabbalah: The Commentary on Sefer Yeṣirah Attributed to Isaac the Blind and Its History in Kabbalah and Scholarship Ariel Zinder | The Siluq in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry from Al-Andalus: New Discoveries Gideon Freudenthal | Maimon the Kabbalist Boris Kleiner | Gradation of the Disjunctive Accents in the Bible Recitation of Jews of Yemen and in Other Jewish Traditions: On the Prosodic Hierarchy in the Recitation Books Received English Abstracts

In this exciting book, Professor Moshe Halbertal of the Hebrew University and the Shalom Hartman Institute uncovers with brilliant conceptual clarity the religious world of the philosophically inclined rabbinic scholars of southern France. With impressive erudition, Halbertal surveys most of the relevant thirteenth- and fourteenth-century primary source material, both in print and in manuscript, with an emphasis on the writing and thought of Menah· em ha-Meiri of Perpignan (d.1315). Meiri was the leading talmudist of a proud and self-consciously independent southern French Jewish community at the turn of the thirteenth century and the author of an encyclopedic commentary on the Talmud, Bet ha-Beh· irah. Gregg Stern, Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts, AJS Review, 27:1, 2003

The Halachic tradition is basically one based on commentary. This book discusses the process of commentary.