Jewish History最新文献

This article seeks to clarify the methodology of Jewish legal history and illustrate how the historical examination of Jewish law serves as a valuable tool to discern the distinctive character of the early modern period. Principal elements of the analysis are the role of Jewish law in communal governance, its relationship to civil legislation, and its responsiveness to social and economic challenges. Communal autonomy, a hallmark of the early modern Jewish community and its self-governing institutions, had well-established roots in the medieval period, but it was only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the post-Westphalia (1648) era, that its distinctive legislative and judicial features were fully developed and widely adopted. The participation of rabbinic authorities in communal government and their consultative role alongside lay governing officials was of particular importance. As unofficial jurisconsultants, they provided guidance on matters of legislation, when a legal ambiguity required clarification, or when litigation involving the community was pending. Poskim (halakhic decisors) were asked to review and, in some instances, interpret communal bylaws. Important new trends in legal decision-making in areas of dispute resolution and judicial discretion and the devising of legal remedies to ease social or economic difficulties provides valuable illustrations of responsiveness to social and economic change. Legal activism is especially notable in areas of law relating to the rights of women regarding inheritance and marital property. Despite lay hegemony in community affairs, religion continued to be a potent force in civil government and legislation, and there was a far greater degree of cooperation between the lay and rabbinic authorities than has been previously assumed.

This essay presents the discovery of a previously almost entirely unknown treatise written in Judeo-Arabic by Rav Hai b. Sherira Gaon. This monograph, a manual for judges, is a Jewish instantiation of the well-established Muslim genre Adab al-Qāḍī (Duties of Judges). To date, only several indirect remnants translated into medieval Hebrew have been identified as part of this work; however, large parts of the skeleton of this halakhic monograph can be reconstructed from Genizah fragments. Not only is this work of immense importance with respect to judicial issues, but it also promises to elucidate aspects of halakhic literature written in Judeo-Arabic generally. After presenting the historical-philological thinking that led to this discovery, this article considers the text’s importance and the social-literary circumstances that led to its development within its Islamic context. The Islamic and Jewish texts of the genre lead to the adoption of a more detailed model of the mutual shared legal relationships between Jews and Muslims in medieval Babylonia and yield what may be viewed as a more complicated and nuanced approach to the monotheistic-Abrahamic triangle.

Abstract

The Stadtarchiv in Münster, Germany holds a medieval Hebrew fragment with portions of the daily Shema Yisrael prayer. Measuring 510 mm in height, this fragment is but a quarter of a large-sized parchment sheet, which was designed to be hung on a wall. This study introduces the fragment and describes its material features and then suggests its possible function against the backdrop of talmudic discussions on biblical texts that are incorporated in prayer. In light of the halakhic position that biblical verses should not be recited from memory but only from a written text, the original sheet was intended to provide worshippers with an accessible copy of the Shema text, since many did not have personal prayerbooks.

This study focuses on a member of the secondary rabbinic elite in northern Italy around the year 1600, Rabbi Jacob Heilbronn (d. 1625). Based on an examination of legal sources cited by Heilbronn in a responsum and a Judeo-German handbook of Jewish law that he prepared, the article argues that Heilbronn understood the notion of German, or Ashkenazic Jewry as a cultural construct that was independent of geography. He was interested in a specific legal tradition handed down from generation to generation, wherever it may have migrated to, not the practices of Jews living in the German lands. Thus, Heilbronn accepted Rabbi Moses Isserles (d. 1572) of Kraków as an authoritative voice of Ashkenazic practice. The study notes that in the years between the publication of Rabbi Joseph Caro’s legal code, Shulḥan ‘Arukh, in 1565 and its republication with Isserles’s glosses in Venice (1593), and probably for a few years thereafter, Heilbronn relied on Caro’s Shulḥan ‘Arukh even though it often represented Sephardic traditions. However, once Heilbronn had access to legal works from Poland, he not only adopted them in his own legal thinking but adapted them for the use of others through vernacularization.

The Yiddish Scientific Institute, known by its Yiddish acronym YIVO, was funded in Vilna in 1925. The institute had four sections: Philology, History, Psychology-Pedagogy, and Economics-Statistics. Its principal goal was not only to produce scholarship concerning Eastern European Jewish populations but also to promote Yiddish as a scientific language. This article analyzes the tensions associated with using Yiddish in academia generally and in social science particularly. It demonstrates how this linguistic commitment to Yiddish led to certain compromises dictated by the need to share academic research, expand readership, and secure financial support. It aims to explore these linguistic matters by focusing on the activities and scholarly production of the Economic-Statistical section—the “ekstat” section—from its first meeting in 1926 to 1939. This section offers a particularly relevant case study because of its highly specific situation within YIVO. Located in Berlin and then in Warsaw, the Economic-Statistical section was relatively autonomous from the central headquarters in Vilna. More importantly, the section had closer ties to German academia, which explains its greater openness toward foreign (non-Yiddish) languages. Drawing upon sources including published materials, the administrative records of YIVO, and the personal archives of the section’s key members, I document the ways in which this linguistic commitment toward Yiddish informed both the scholarly output of the section and its day-to-day activities.

Abstract

The historiography of modern Hebrew culture views early twentieth-century Russia largely through the lens of canonical literature. However, Hebrew played a role in many other aspects of Jewish society, prominent among them children’s literature. By examining readers’ letters published in four Hebrew children’s magazines, this article explores the spread and meaning of the language for different sectors of Russian Jewry. It claims that Hebrew played a role in Jewish modernization for those who did not identify with Zionism and even those who claimed to reject modernism entirely. To better understand East European Jewish life through the prism of multifaceted Hebrew culture, this article studies publications of varied ideological positions—Zionist, nonpartisan nationalist, and Orthodox—to provide a more comprehensive picture of Jewish perception of Hebrew. It shows how, despite their disparities, the four publications employed similar strategies when addressing young readers, directing them to a desired worldview and mobilizing them to social activity. The readers’ letters in these magazines reveal the experience of learning, reading, and speaking the renewed language in the context of family life, social pressure, and gender dynamics. They provide essential information about methods, habits, and patterns of using Hebrew inside and outside the classroom. In addition, the letters shed light on the interaction between children and adults—parents, teachers, and newspaper editors—against the backdrop of the vibrant ideological discourse of the era. On balance, the current research offers a contribution to the study of revitalized Hebrew culture as well as the social history of modern European Jewry.