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Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources-archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin-she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical development. Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism emerged. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, becoming the classical form of the religion. Through ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz re-examines this critical moment in Jewish history and presents a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage. She shows how notions of female and male were developed by the rabbis of Roman Palestine and why the distinctions were so important in the formation of their religious and legal tradition. Rabbinic attention to women, men, sexuality, and gender took place within the \"ordinary tedium of everyday life, in acts that were both familiar and mundane.\" While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues, which Peskowitz deftly explicates. Her study of ancient spinning and her abundant source material will set new standards in the fields of gender studies, Jewish studies, and cultural studies.

This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis’ new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one's self and one's body and, more broadly, the relations between one’s self and one's human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Migrating Tales situates the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli, in its cultural context by reading several rich rabbinic stories against the background of Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, much of it Christian in origin. In this nuanced work, Richard Kalmin argues that non-Jewish literature deriving from the eastern Roman provinces is a crucially important key to interpreting Babylonian rabbinic literature, to a degree unimagined by earlier scholars. Kalmin demonstrates the extent to which rabbinic Babylonia was part of the Mediterranean world of late antiquity and part of the emerging but never fully realized cultural unity forming during this period in Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and western Persia. Kalmin recognizes that the Bavli contains remarkable diversity, incorporating motifs derived from the cultures of contemporaneous religious and social groups. Looking closely at the intimate relationship between narratives of the Bavli and of the Christian Roman Empire, Migrating Tales brings the history of Judaism and Jewish culture into the ambit of the ancient world as a whole.

Jewish Culture and Creativity honors the wide-ranging scholarship of Prof. Michael Fishbane with contributions of his students on subjects that cover the gamut of Jewish studies, from biblical and rabbinic literature to medieval and modern Jewish culture, and concluding with case studies of the creative application of Prof. Fishbane’s thought and theology in contemporary Jewish life. The innovative scholarship represented in this volume offers critical new perspectives from antiquity to contemporary Judaism and will serve as a stimulus for new directions in and beyond the field of Jewish studies.

In Simeon the Righteous in Rabbinic Literature: A Legend Reinvented, Amram Tropper investigates the rabbinic traditions about Simeon the Righteous, a renowned Jewish leader of Second Temple times, and the history of their formation.

This paper examines a previously unknown anonymous Hebrew letter inserted into a postwar edition of Shem HaGedolim, found in the library of the Jewish University in Budapest. The letter, composed in Győr in 1947, consists almost entirely of passages copied from Tiferet Chayim, a hagiographic genealogy of the Sanz Hasidic dynasty. Although derivative in content, the letter’s form and placement suggest it was not meant for transmission but instead served as a private act of mourning and historiographical preservation. By situating the letter within the broader context of post-Holocaust Jewish and Hasidic memory practices, including yizkor books, rabbinic memoirs, and grassroots commemorative writing, this study proposes that the document constitutes a “micro-yizkor”: a bibliographic ritual that aimed to re-inscribe lost tzaddikim into sacred memory. Drawing on theories of trauma, religious coping, and bereavement psychology, particularly the Two-Track Model of Bereavement, the paper examines the letter as both a therapeutic and historiographical gesture. The author’s meticulous copying, selective omissions, and personalized touches (such as modified honorifics and emotive phrases) reflect an attempt to maintain spiritual continuity in the wake of communal devastation. Engaging scholarship by Michal Shaul, Lior Becker, Gershon Greenberg, and others, the analysis demonstrates how citation, far from being a passive act, functions here as an instrument of resistance, memory, and redemptive reconstruction. The existence of such a document can also be examined through the lens of Maurice Rickards’ insights, particularly his characterization of the “compulsive note” as a salient form of ephemera, materials often inserted between the pages of books, which pose unique challenges for interpreting the time capsule their authors sought to construct. Ultimately, the paper argues that this modest and anonymous document offers a rare window into postwar Ultra-orthodox religious subjectivity. It challenges prevailing assumptions about Hasidic silence after the Holocaust and demonstarates how even derivative texts can serve as potent sites of historical testimony, spiritual resilience, and bibliographic mourning. The letter thus sheds light on a neglected form of Hasidic historiography, one authored not by professional historians, but by the broken-hearted, writing in the margins of sacred books.

Explores rabbinic views of Ishmael, the biblical figure seen as the first Arab. Ishmael on the Border is an in-depth study of the rabbinic treatment of Abraham's firstborn son, Ishmael. This book examines Ishmael's conflicted portrayal over a thousand-year period and traces the shifts and nuances in his representation within the Jewish tradition before and after the emergence of Islam. In classical rabbinic texts, Ishmael is depicted in a variety of ways. By examining the biblical account of Ishmael's life, Carol Bakhos points to the tension between his membership in and expulsion from Abraham's household-on the one hand he is circumcised with Abraham, yet on the other, because of divine favor, his brother supplants him as primogenitor. The rabbis address his liminal status in a variety of ways. Like Esau, he is often depicted in antipodal terms. He is Israel's \"Other.\" Yet, Bakhos notes, the emergence of Islam and the changing ethnic, religious, and political landscape of the Near East in the seventh century affected later, medieval rabbinic depictions of Ishmael, whereby he becomes the symbol of Islam and the eponymous prototype of Arabs. With this inquiry into the rabbinic portrayal of Ishmael, the book confronts the interfacing of history and hermeneutics and the ways in which the rabbis inhabited a world of intertwined political, social, and theological forces.

The central institutional model that served Jewish Orthodoxy in its struggle with the threat to the tradition of the modern era and from which grew its intellectual leadership was ultimately the model of the Lithuanian Yeshiva. However, from the second half of the nineteenth-century, new models of Jewish higher education institutions emerged and were even adopted by Orthodox circles. How, then, did the trustees of the Lithuanian yeshiva model see the new institutional models? Our discussion will focus on the modern yeshivas and rabbinical seminaries that accepted the Orthodox halakhic view, including the Tahkemoni rabbinical seminary in Warsaw, the Hildesheimer Seminary in Berlin (1873–1938), and the Seminary for the Diaspora in Jerusalem (1956). The Lithuanian rabbis held to the supremacy of the Lithuanian Yeshiva model. However, until World War II, they saw the Orthodox rabbinical seminary as an institute suitable to its time and place—Germany, most of whose Jews were liberal—and did not consider it able to produce a Torah scholar worthy of his name. They opposed the establishment of rabbinical seminaries in Eastern Europe and the Land of Israel, and after the war, when the issue of establishing a rabbinical seminary in Jerusalem was raised, they rejected the Orthodox rabbinical seminary outright and no longer recognized its contribution to its time and place—Germany.

This article explores the cultural background and doctrinal formation of Jesus at the First Council of Nicaea within the broader discourse on the holy man in late antiquity. In the Roman Empire, the figure of the charismatic miracle worker emerged as a popular religious folk hero, a pattern evident in monastic, ecclesiastical, and rabbinic literature. The paper investigates the conditions that enabled the emergence and spread of such a figure within Jewish and Christian communities after the destruction of the Second Temple. It argues that the terminology adopted at Nicaea to define the divine nature of the Holy Son was shaped, in part, by the need to distinguish Jesus from the broader phenomenon of the charismatic holy man. By examining traditions of rainmaking asceticism and comparing Honi the Circle Maker and Simeon the Stylites in canonized fifth-century texts, this study analyzes how the holy man was appropriated into both rabbinic and ecclesiastical discourses.

In this lively and intellectually engaging book, Galit Hasan-Rokem shows that religion is shaped not only in the halls of theological disputation and institutions of divine study, but also in ordinary events of everyday life. Common aspects of human relations offer a major source for the symbols of religious texts and rituals of late antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues, early Christianity, Hasan-Rokem argues. Focusing on the \"neighborhood\" of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era.