We are pleased to present readers with volume 23 of the journal Massorot: Studies in Language Traditions and Jewish Languages . The present volume contains nine articles focusing on diverse facets of Jewish Languages, and on the traditions and features of Hebrew reflected in the varied genres cultivated in that language. Five of the articles deal with translations. Two of them concern Bible translations into Judeo-Arabic. Moshe Bar-Asher, who has analyzed and published widely on the Western šarḥ – that is, the Jewish Maghrebi translation of the Bible – examines euphemism and language refinement "in the face of danger" with respect to the šarḥ of the Pentateuchal books of Numbers and Deuteronomy. Tamar Zewi examines alternative translations in the Judeo-Arabic Tafsīr of R. Saadia Gaon on Exodus, on the basis of the excellent manuscript of the commentary, Yevr. II C1, housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Nahem Ilan discusses the Judeo-Arabic translation of the second part of the Hebrew work Pele Yo‘eṣ by Rabbi Eliezer Papo (Bulgaria, 1786–1827), composed in the middle of the 20th century by Rabbi Makhlouf Idan of Djerba. Yaffa Yisraeli analyzes the translation into the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Saqqiz (Iranian Kurdistan) of the noted piyyuṭ (liturgical poem) “Yashen al teradam,” by Rabbi Yehudah Halevy. Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers readers a comparative analysis of six Ladino translations of the description of the lover in Song of Songs, Chapter 5, representing both the Eastern and Western Ladino traditions, from the 16th–20th centuries. Assaf Ben-Moshe draws our attention to the linguistic diversity of the Jews of Iraq by comparing the divergences between the Judeo-Arabic variety used by the Jews of ˁĀna and that used by the Baghdad Jewish community. Dalit Assouline examines the Hebrew used by Mizrahi rabbis who joined the Breslav Hasidic sect, originally of Ashkenazic origin. Efraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah zooms in on another genre, the epistles exchanged by rabbinic scholars concerning books. Kedem Golden deals with Hebrew poetic riddles.

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.

In the preface to his book Emek Hamelech Rabbi Naftali Bacharach lists his ten books, noting that the first is Emek Hamelech , and the second is Gan ha-Melekh , his commentary on the Zohar printed here for the first time. Bacharach's style in Emek Hamelech is similar to his style in Gan Hamelech , however, while Emek Hamelech was written according to the order of Emanation, Gan Hamelech was written as a commentary to the Zohar. In general, the Kabbalistic writing of Bacharach is characterized by the fact that it is full of messianic tension, and unlike most descriptions of the Emanation in Lurianic Kabbalah that we are familiar with, Bacharach also describes the first stages of the Emanation in Messianic terms.

We are pleased to present our readers with this double issue of Massorot , volume 21–22, published by the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures in collaboration with the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center. The volume contains eleven articles which testify to the varied interests of contemporary scholars in the field of Jewish languages and the Hebrew traditions of the diverse communities of the Jewish People. Five of the articles concern themselves with Bible translations in Jewish languages, four of these in varieties of Judeo-Arabic: Moshe Bar-Asher discusses the conservative features of the Sharḥ (Judeo-Arabic calque translations transmitted orally) in the Maghreb. Shay Matsa deals with the last Judeo-Arabic Bible translation from Aleppo and its author. Ibrahim Bassal scrutinizes the interplay of elements from the Tafsīr of Saadiah Gaon and the Syriac Bible tradition in a Christian Arabic Bible translation. Zahi Abbas discusses the distinctive features of Saadiah Gaon’s Judeo-Arabic Bible translation. Yaffa Israeli analyzes translations of the Book of Jonah in three different regional dialects of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, from Urmi, Saqqiz and Rawanduz. Another two articles are concerned with other aspects of Judeo-Arabic in North Africa: Paul B. Fenton discusses three Judeo-Arabic historical dirges, two from the Tafilalt region and one from Algiers. Mor Daniel analyzes the forms of the plural used in the Judeo-Arabic of newspapers published in Tunis at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Two articles in the volume deal with Jewish Romance languages: Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald offers the fruit of her research into the Passover Haggadah published in Sofia in Cyrillic letters. Michael Ryzhik focuses on the linguistic features of two Judeo-Italian dramas in Latin letters. Two articles in the volume are concerned with the Hebrew language traditions of different Jewish communities: Mor Shemesh analyzes the whole plural forms of segholate nouns in the reading of the Mishnah according to the late Ashkenazi tradition. Adam Bin-Nun discusses the link between the Yemenite version of the Torah text and that of Maimonides.

We are pleased to present readers with volume 19–20 of the journal Massorot , dedicated from its inception to research on Hebrew and Jewish language traditions. The present volume contains 12 articles and a book review. They reflect the investigations of 16 researchers, since three of the articles were produced through the fruitful collaboration of two authors. Five of the articles deal with diverse aspects of Judeo-Arabic, both in the Middle Ages and the modern era. Moshe Bar-Asher focuses on disparate translations of a single Biblical Hebrew lexical item in the Maghrebian Sharḥ or literal Bible-translation tradition, and Gabriel Rosenbaum discusses the unique language of the Karaites of Egypt, a variety of Arabic containing distinctive words and expressions of Hebrew origin. Yosef Yuval Tobi analyzes Arabic poetic verses employed by grammarians and philosophers writing in Judeo-Arabic during the Middle Ages. Nahem Ilan reviews the new lexicon of medieval Judeo-Arabic (Jerusalem, 2016) by Mordechai Akiva Friedman, and Rachel Hasson offers a detailed analysis of the language of two Judeo-Arabic folktales from the Cairo Genizah. The contribution by Yehudit Henshke demonstrates the influence of spoken Maghrebian Judeo-Arabic on the Hebrew of Israeli immigrants from Morocco and their descendants. The article by Yael Reshef and Einat Gonen, too, focuses on influences on spoken Hebrew — in this instance, traces of traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew on the Hebrew spoken in Israel in the early 1960s. The volume includes English abstracts.

The characters of the Yanuka (the Zoharic Wunderkind) and the Sava (the wise old man), appear in various Zoharic stories, revealing themselves to the sages of the Zohar (Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai and his disciples). These two figures are among the most meaningful and complex mythical figures in Zoharic literature. The main argument in this work is that the Sava and Yanuka characters are portrayed as the embodiment of God and his Son (and the Messiah). This book is the first attempt to grasp the full extent and depth of these mythical figures and the close ties that exist between them. At the same time, the book reveals an important chapter in the history of Jewish myth and contributes to the understanding of the messianic consciousness that characterizes the stories of the Sava and Yanuka in the Zohar and exposes their hidden and polemical ties with Christianity.

The book presents a broad and varied picture of Islam. It covers a wide range of topics, including faith and jurisprudence, theology and philosophy, mysticism, culture and society, from the dawn of Islam in the seventh century to contemporary times. Geographically, the book encompasses such regions as the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and Europe/West . The book traces lines of continuity and change in Islam throughout the ages on such complex and sensitive issues as religion and state, the concept of jihad, Islamic attitudes to religious minorities or to Western Christian culture. These issues became hotly debated in the modern era, especially from the late 18th century, when Muslim societies were forced to contend with European colonialism, political upheavals, social and economic schisms, and identity crises . There is a clear need for a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction book in Hebrew for students and readers alike so that the appearance of the book is timely. Apart from containing new materials, the book also contains many insights, and in some cases reexamines and revisits prevailing scholarly approaches.

Jewish thought and rhetoric may have dominated the Jewish people's way of life for years, but what happens when a Jewish state is established, whose laws and authorities are not necessarily based on that same Jewish tradition? Jewish-Israeli Political Thought is a collection of studies exploring the tension between Israeli and Jewish political philosophy, the relationship between the Jewish people's collective and personal past and present, individual identity and its place in the traditional Jewish collectiveness, and the intermediary role of the ancient Hebrew language in the dialogue between the past and the present. The chapters in this book were written by young scholars of different religious, and sometimes cultural and lingual backgrounds; however, they all live in modern-day Israel, and they all question the relation between traditional-Jewish and modern-Israeli political thought. The diversity of the writers enables a broad and unique perspective on the status of Jewish tradition in contemporary political thought in Israel. The book provides a window into various spatial and temporal horizons in the course of a Jewish tradition that is constantly being re-examined and re-discovered.

We are pleased to present the readers with volume 18 of Massorot , published through the cooperation of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The present volume contains nine articles and a review (with additional notes) of an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary. The contributions include work by established authorities in the field of Jewish language research, as well as the fruit of younger researchers who have recently joined their ranks. The diversity of the scholarship in the present volume is to be seen in the wide variety of languages discussed, the varied linguistic and literary topics analyzed, as well as the diverse periods in which the sources studied were produced. In his article, Moshe Bar-Asher analyzes the Romance component in the varieties of Judeo-Arabic spoken in recent generations in Ksar Es-Souk, Morocco. Chava Turniansky focuses on the Hebrew component in literary Yiddish as an indicator of the level of traditional education of the writers incorporating it in works they composed in the second decade of the 18th century. Michal Held examines reflections of spoken Judeo-Spanish woven into the weave of a contemporary Hebrew novel. Ilil Baum analyzes the use of the productive suffix -ad̠a in Judeo-Spanish as compared with the use of its cognates in non-Jewish languages of Ibero-Romance stock. Hanoch Gamliel argues in his article that some of the lĕ‘azim (or Old Judeo-French explanatory elements) adduced in Rashi’s commentary on the Torah should be understood as examples of grammatical categories rather than as lexical correspondents. Two of the articles in the present volume deal with problems of translation. Michael Ryzhik examines how the Hebrew names of birds and fowl appearing in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 were rendered in Judeo-Italian Bible translations from the 15th and 16th centuries. Shay Matsa focuses on the linguistic characteristics of a modern Arabic translation of the Passover Haggadah produced in 2003 by a Jew from Syria, examined in the light of personal observations made to the author by the translator himself. Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald compares the linguistic features of two texts in Ladino composed by the same author, Rabbi Meir Benveniste of mid-16th-century Salonika. Efraim Hazan presents and analyzes a letter of friendship in Hebrew verse from Morocco; the numerical value of the Hebrew letters of each stanza (except one) is 654, corresponding to the Hebrew year ([5]654 = 1894) in which the letter was written. The closing article focuses on an unpublished Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary written by Meir Berger in the 1970s. This article includes an introduction by Berger’s former student, Chava Turniansky, and personal notes by his son, Yitzhaq Berger. These are followed by Yitskhok Niborski’s review of Berger’s dictionary, in which it is compared with the 1960 Hebrew–Yiddish dictionary of Mordechai Tsanin. Niborski’s review was translated from Yiddish into Hebrew by Moshe Taube. The book features article summaries in English.

We are pleased to present the readers with a new, double issue of Massorot , volumes 16–17, published through the collaboration of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures and the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The present volume offers ten articles devoted to Hebrew and Jewish language studies, some by veteran researchers, others by younger scholars. Half of them were originally presented as lectures at the Fourth International Conference of the Center for Jewish Languages and Literatures, convened to mark the 25th anniversary of the Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The theme of the conference, held in Tammuz 5770 / June 2010, was “Original Compositions and Translated Works in Jewish Languages”. The articles published in this volume deal with a range of Jewish languages, the majority of them Jewish languages of Romance stock: the articles by Shmuel Refael, Ángel Berenguer Amador, and Omer Shafran focus on Judeo-Spanish (or Judezmo, Ladino); the articles by Cyril Aslanov and Doron Modan are devoted to Jewish varieties of French; and the article by Michael Ryzhik concentrates on Judeo-Italian. Jewish Malayalam, the study of which is still in its infancy, is discussed in the article by Ophira Gamliel. Issues relating to the study of languages in contact, which frequently arise in Jewish language analysis, come to the fore in several of the articles in the present volume: the article by Esther Adamit analyzes the ways in which multiple languages influenced the selection of Jewish toponyms appearing on the title pages of Hebrew-letter works published in Europe; and the contribution by Doron Modan analyzes the influence of several European languages on the Hebrew component incorporated in a collection of communal regulations written in the language of the Jews of Bordeaux and Bayonne.Two of the articles in this volume discuss Hebrew language traditions. The article by Moshe Bar-Asher analyzes the Hebrew that emerges from tombstone inscriptions from Meknes as reflected in the volume Avne Zikkaron, by Rabbi Yosef Messas. The contribution by Ilan Eldar discusses the origins of the traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew. The book features article summaries in English.

In Broadening Jewish History Todd Endelman seeks to expand the horizons of modern Jewish historiography by focusing on 'ordinary' rather than exceptional Jews, arguing that what ordinary people did or felt can do more to deepen our understanding of Jewish history than what a few exceptional individuals thought and wrote. He also makes a strong case for comparative history, showing convincingly that only a comparison across national borders can identify the Germanness of German Jewish history or the Englishness of English Jewish history, and thereby reveal what is unique about each. This innovative collection of historiographical essays and case studies redefines the area under consideration and deftly restates the need for Jewish social history to counterbalance the current focus on cultural studies. The essays offer an important examination of the major trends in the writing of modern Jewish history and the assumptions that have guided historians in their narration of the Jewish past. Professor Endelman shows in particular how the two watershed events of twentieth-century Jewish history-the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel-influenced Jewish historiography for decades thereafter. He also demonstrates how progressive integration into the scholarly framework of American academia has shaped both the form and the content of Jewish historical research. Each of the case studies focuses on a largely unknown figure whose career illustrates the often tortuous paths of integration and acceptance that Jews faced. Some achieved fleeting fame but many of the people who populate the volume remain altogether unknown, their histories recoverable only as statistics. In its wide-ranging analysis of trends in recent historical writing and its treatment of key themes and issues, this book is essential reading for professional historians, students, and indeed all those with an interest in Jewish history.