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The present collection makes available in fresh translations all of the ancient examples of the Jewish novels, and introduces them for the student and general reader. The texts are divided into three categories: novels, historical novels, and testaments, and each text is given its own introduction. Similarities and differences are discussed in regard to other ancient popular literature, such as Greek novels, Roman novels, Christian novels, and Apocryphal Acts, and the distinction between fiction and history is explored. Jewish identity and the competition of ethnic groups are generally the themes, but with the large number of women characters, we are also afforded insights into gender constructions in Jewish popular literature. The protagonists of Jewish novels are often figures otherwise unknown to Jewish history, but are sometimes also biblical patriarchs (Moses, Joseph, Abraham, Job), although their stories are told here in a way surprisingly different from what is found in the Hebrew Bible. There are also possible allusions to Jewish mysticism and mysteries in some of the texts.

The texts are: Greek Esther, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon (or Bel and the Serpent) from Greek Daniel, Tobit, Judith, Third Maccabees, The Marriage and Conversion of Aseneth (or Joseph and Aseneth), The Tobiad Romance, The Royal Family of Adiabene, the Testament of Joseph, the Testament of Job, and the Testament of Abraham. Some of the novels are found in the Old Testament Apocrypha, while others derive from other sources, such as Josephus or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

If history is narrative, then Ezra-Nehemiah is only partly history. Well over half of Ezra-Nehemiah is not a narrative but rather a patchwork of cited texts that are frequently intervening in the story. The capacity of citations in Ezra-Nehemiah to offend the historiographical, aesthetic, and theological sensibilities of scholars invites the question of what citation accomplishes in this context. This book labels the citation style in Ezra-Nehemiah as “archival historiography.” It argues that the act of citation in Ezra-Nehemiah forms an alternative site of archiving and this hybrid literary form prioritizes the assembly and organization of documents over the production of a seamless narrative. The argument begins by comparing this literary form with archival institutions and practices across the landscape of the ancient Near East, contending that Ezra-Nehemiah adapts the symbolic power of these ancient collections. It then identifies the role of the imperial archive within the narrative of Ezra-Nehemiah, where it surfaces as an axial and ambivalent source of political power. By reviewing the cited documents in Ezra-Nehemiah, this book argues that the act of citation is not solely or even primarily in the business of authorizing this account or symbolizing the fulfillment of prophetic promises. Rather, citation in Ezra-Nehemiah is aimed at reestablishing a community by organizing memory into retrievable texts. Archival historiography thus constitutes an essential act of communal recovery and represents the cultural vitality of the Judean community after the losses of exile and while living in the long shadow of imperial rule.

This volume offers a rereading of several canonical stories in Jewish texts and Greek tragedy using devoted resistance as the interpretative lens. These include the stories of Isaac and Iphigenia who were used as exemplars of a total and unyielding commitment to the values of God and country, the Talmudic “Snake Oven” story, which is considered by many as a triumphant source-text for human autonomy as a Jewish religious value, the iconic Talmudic figure Beruriah and the biblical figure of Hannah, who was elevated by the Talmud into a central paradigm for Jewish prayer. These stories highlight the ways in which cultural heroes can distort key parts of themselves and their traditions in the name of tradition itself. This volume explains the tendency of carriers of culture to enshrine authoritative voices in the collective imagination through their selection of canonical stories and to stigmatize and marginalize traditions seen as standing in opposition to the dominant system. It also discusses the effectiveness of devoted resistance as a literary interpretative tool in allowing us to hear the voices of people who have been marginalized, and yet ultimately preserved, by the often brutal mechanisms of cultural authority.

Arguing with Aseneth shows how the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. With attention to the ways in which Aseneth’s tale “remixes” Genesis, wrestles with Deuteronomic theology, and adopts prophetic visions of the future, Arguing with Aseneth demonstrates that this ancient novel inscribes into Israel’s sacred narrative a precedent for gentile inclusion in the people belonging to Israel’s God. Aseneth is transformed from material mother of the sons of Joseph to a mediator of God’s mercy and life to future penitents, Jew and gentile alike. Yet not all Jewish thinkers in antiquity drew boundaries the same way or in the same place. Arguing with Aseneth traces, then, not only the way in which Joseph and Aseneth affirms the possibility of gentile incorporation but also ways in which other ancient Jewish thinkers, including the apostle Paul, would have argued back, contesting Joseph and Aseneth’s conclusions or offering competing strategies of inclusion. With its use of a female protagonist, Joseph and Aseneth offers a distinctive model of gentile incorporation—one that eschews lines of patrilineal descent and undermines ethnicity and genealogy as necessary markers of belonging. Such a reading of this narrative shows us that we need to rethink our accounts of how ancient Jewish thinkers negotiated who was in and who was out when it came to the people of Israel’s God.

This book studies the Zohar as a work of literature. While the Zohar has long been recognized as a signal achievement of mystical theology, myth, and exegesis, this monograph presents a poetics of zoharic narrative, a morphology of mystical storytelling. Topics examined include mysticism and literature; fiction and pseudepigraphy; diaspora and exile; dramatic monologue and the representation of emotion; voice, gesture, and the theatrics of the zoharic tale; the wandering quest for wisdom; anagnorisis and the poetics of recognition; encounters with the natural world as stimuli for mystical creativity; the dynamic relationship between narrative and exegesis; magical realism and the fantastic in the representation of experience and Being; narrative ethics and the exemplum of virtuous piety in the Zohar; the place of the zoharic frame-tale in the comparative context of medieval Iberian literature, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

Becoming Hebrew is a study of the ways in which a Zionist national culture was generated in the Jewish Yishuv (prestate community) of Palestine between 1900 and 1914. The book addresses three principal lacunae in the study of Zionist culture to date. The first of these is chronological. Much of the literature to date has assumed that a distinctive Zionist national culture began to appear in Palestine during the interwar period, whereas Becoming Hebrew argues that its formative period in fact predates the war. Out of this chronological claim emerge the two additional, more conceptually and theoretically substantive, correctives. In the first instance, the book shows that the relationship between the Zionist cultural undertaking and traditional Jewish culture is far more complicated and nuanced than has often been recognized. Joining a new and important historiographical trend, the book suggests further that the Zionist case sheds important light on nationalism generally, which itself emerges in a more complex and dialectical relationship with the religious cultures and traditional societies out of which it grows than has often been acknowledged in much of the now classical literature. Finally, in its conceptualization of “culture” as created in Zionist Palestine, the book synthesizes a literary‐like study of imageries and discourses and a more anthropological examination of observable cultural practices and tangible, public social processes to produce a history of culture as a broad interweaving of many aspects of human life.

Auschwitz is the center of the twentieth century, its dark core, yet, in the postwar years in America few intellectuals dared to come to grips with the horror and the suffering. Jewish theologians too were slow to respond until, in the turbulent years of the sixties and beyond, a small number of Jewish thinkers came to realize that the survival of Judaism and continued Jewish life require first and foremost confronting Auschwitz; looking into the abyss had become unavoidable. In this book, Michael Morgan tells the story of these theologians, and offers the first comprehensive overview of post‐Holocaust Jewish theology. He gives an account of the encounter with the death camps in the postwar writings of figures such as Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi and describes the role of the Six Day War in 1967 on the development and reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought. In chapters on each of the central thinkers (Richard Rubinstein, Eliezer Berkovits, Irving Greenberg, Arthur Cohen, and Emil Fackenheim), he analyzes the way they have struggled with the dialectic of history and identity, and with the threat of radical rupture. Throughout the book, the intellectual developments are set in their historical context and there are chapters on the reception of post‐Holocaust Jewish thought and its legacy for today. This is a book of philosophical and theological analysis as well as a work of intellectual history and will interest a wide spectrum of readers.

Empathy is a way of re-membering oneself with the religious other that buttresses an interreligious unity-in-diversity. This book therefore proposes a way of strengthening the bonds of friendship and dialogue between Judaism and Catholicism is through a more detailed consideration of the phenomenological category of empathy vis-à-vis Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) and Edith Stein (1891–1942). The book's methodology is phenomenological and narrative in approach, and is therefore necessarily contextual in so far as it takes seriously the post-Shoah situation. Heschel's call for a prophetic return to God, a call that is “ecumenically” expansive and supportive of humanity's need to receive otherness, is a call to live life in the form of response to God's pathos. This call finds a prophetic response through Edith Stein's interreligiously attuned scholarship and witness of empathy, as narratively “drawn” from within the chiarascuro horizon of the Shoah. Stein's portrait rises in the typology of “mandorla” figure—as one capable of dialectically bridging sameness with otherness—conveying an em-pathos in word and deed that is less narrow and more interreligious in kind, precisely because her “way” of martyrdom is as a re-memberer with the religious other(s) who is same: she neither distances herself nor denies her consanguinity with the Jewish people. Stein's Jewish and Christian fidelity, while being an archetype for interreligious relations, also challenges Catholicism to do the teshuva work of remembering its Jewish heritage through new categories of witnessing and belonging with otherness.

Over the last several decades, an astonishing phenomenon has developed: a Jewish rebirth of sorts occurring throughout Africa. Different ethnic groups proclaim that they are returning to long forgotten Jewish roots and African clans trace their lineage to the Lost Tribes of Israel. This book addresses the elaboration and the development of Jewish identities by Africans. Africans have encountered Jewish myths and traditions in multiple forms and under a number of situations. The context and circumstances of these encounters produced a series of influences that gradually led, within some African societies, to the elaboration of a new Jewish identity connected with that of the Diaspora. The book presents one by one the different groups of Black Jews from western central, eastern, and southern Africa, and the ways in which they have used and imagined their oral history and traditional customs to construct a distinct Jewish identity. The purpose of the book is to review the processes and immensely complex interactions which shaped these new religious identities. It explores the way in which Africans have interacted with the ancient mythological sub-strata of both western and Africans idea of Jews in order to create a distinct Jewish identity. It particularly seeks to identify and to assess colonial influences and their internalization by African societies in the shaping of new African religious identities. Along with these notions the book examines how, in the absence of recorded African history, the eminently malleable accounts of Jewish lineage developed by African groups inspired by Judaism co-exist with the possible historical traces of a Jewish presence in Africa.

The book analyses and assesses the various methods and approaches used by nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century scholars researching into the theme of the unity and diversity of the compositional structure of the Old Testament book of Isaiah. It considers the differences between the traditional, historical–critical, form of Old Testament study and the more modern, post‐critical literary reading, and argues that a more intensive application of the traditional methods would be of great value in studying the unity of the book of Isaiah and in interpreting its message. Focusing on one particular phase in the composition of Isaiah and on the relationship of the central section, known as ‘Deutero‐Isaiah’, to the other parts of the book and to other Old Testament writings, it investigates the literary influences on Deutero‐Isaiah and analyses his subsequent editorial contribution to the continuing prophecy of the judgement and salvation of Israel, thereby reinforcing the argument that critical analysis must precede interpretation.

This book analyzes the history of the interpretation of the book of Job by medieval Jewish exegetes. The scholarship on medieval Jewish thought has focused largely on the systematic philosophical aspects of this literature. The author, however, is concerned with exegesis qua exegesis. He offers a close examination of commentaries on Job written by six major thinkers: Saadiah Gaon (882-942, Egypt and Babylon), Moses Maimonides (1138-1204, Spain and Egypt), Samuel ibn Tibbon (1160-1230, Provence), Zerahiah Hen (13th Century, Barcelona and Rome), Levi Gersonides (1288-1344, Provence), and Simeon ben Zeham Duran (1361-1444, Majorca and Algiers). Saadiah and Maimonides wrote in Arabic, the other four in Hebrew. The author looks at the relationship between the commentaries and their antecedent sources as well as their relationship to the broader context of medieval Jewish thought. He also provides an overview of the questions the commentators confronted about the historicity, national origin, and “Jewishness” of the text. He argues that the commentaries on Job are linked in a coherent and evolving tradition of interpretation and he identifies various views of providence as the central concern of them all.

This book presents a social and religious history of the Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. Initiated by a Jewish “messiah,” Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676), the movement became an influential historical event, in terms of its rapid dissemination and widespread impact, combining Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religious and social elements in the early modern Eurasian world. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666, his followers formed a messianic crypto Judeo-Islamic sect, Dönme, lived mainly in Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, and which has survived to the present. During this long process of self-preservation, the book argues, the Dönmes internalized the Kabbalistic philosophy of a “burden of silence” to conceal their practices from their often hostile surroundings. They came to believe that they must keep their identities secret on pain of “spiritual” and material punishments, which shaped their responses to internal and external challenges over centuries. This “burden of silence” became the core aspect for the Dönme Kabbala. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, well-educated and well-organized community members played important roles in modernizing and secularizing Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. By using Ottoman, Turkish, Jewish, and European written and oral sources, the book narrates and analyzes the Dönme history against broader topics such as messianism, conversion, crypto- and hybrid identities, modernism, and memory.

Traces the development of the Jewish calendar—how months and years were reckoned—from its earliest descriptions in the second century b.c.e. until it reached, in the tenth century c.e., to its present form. Solar and lunar calendars are attested in the early period, but by the first century c.e., the Jewish calendar had become predominantly lunar. A wide range of sources (literary, documentary/epigraphic, Jewish, Graeco‐Roman, and Christian) reveals, however, that Jewish communities in Palestine and the diaspora reckoned their lunar calendar independently from one another, and hence, would often celebrate the same festivals at different times. This diversity persisted until the end of antiquity, although some general trends can be identified. Until the first century c.e., Jewish lunar calendars tended to be late in relation to the solar year, and Passover would always occur after the spring equinox; whereas, by the fourth century, intercalations were adjusted in such a way that Passover was frequently earlier. In the fourth century, moreover, many communities began to calculate the day of the new moon instead of relying on observation of the new crescent, as had previously been the norm. The change from observation to calculation is particularly evident in the case of the rabbinic calendar, for which there is more evidence than any other Jewish calendar. Largely under pressure from the Babylonian rabbinic community, the rabbinic calendar gradually evolved from the third century c.e. into a fixed, calculated calendar, which became dominant in the Jewish world by the tenth century. The general evolution of the Jewish calendar throughout our period, from considerable diversity (solar and lunar calendars) to unity (a single, normative rabbinic calendar), can be explained as epitomizing the emerging solidarity and communitas of the Jewish communities of late antiquity and the early medieval world.

During the medieval period of intense Bible study, one of the most vexing problems facing Jewish interpreters of the Hebrew Bible was how to forge ahead using the new interpretive strategy of uncovering the plain, contextual meaning (peshat), without neglecting revered ancient rabbinic modes of interpretation (derash). This book investigates the ubiquity and necessity of derash‐type interpretations in the biblical commentaries of Radak (R. David Kimhi, c. 1160–1232), a preeminent thirteenth century exegete, analyzing the standard structures in his commentaries with their consistent juxtaposition of peshat and derash-type rabbinic comments. Carefully parsing Radak’s methodological statements and each of the structures he typically employs, the book demonstrates how at times he uses rabbinic traditions to resolve textual questions that arise in exegesis, while at other times, these traditions perform only ancillary functions in his commentaries. The book also examines in detail Radak’s criteria when challenging rabbinic teachings, both in narrative and legal contexts, concluding that most often he rejects rabbinic traditions when they appear to contradict textual biblical evidence, but occasionally also on the grounds of implausibility. Particularly noteworthy is Radak’s questioning rabbinic legal interpretations of Scriptures, which most other exegetes hesitated to do. The book considers the anomaly of Radak’s ample quotation of rabbinic traditions, constantly relying on traditional authority in multiple ways, while simultaneously challenging this same authority by rejecting some rabbinic interpretations. Ultimately, the book concludes that Radak did not find this quotation and challenging of rabbinic traditions as contradictory

Flynn contributes to the emerging field of childhood studies in the Hebrew Bible by isolating stages of a child’s life and, through a comparative perspective, studies the place of children in the domestic cult and their relationship to the deity in that cult. The study gathers data relevant to different stages of a child’s life from a plethora of Mesopotamian materials (prayers, myths, medical texts, rituals), and uses that data as an interpretive lens for Israelite texts about children at similar stages such as: pre-born children, the birth stage, breast feeding, adoption, slavery, children’s death and burial rituals, and childhood delinquency. This analysis presses the questions of value and violence, the importance of the domestic cult for expressing the child’s value beyond economic value, and how children were valued in cultures with high infant mortality rates. From the earliest stages to the moments when children die, and to the children’s responsibilities in the domestic cult later in life, this study demonstrates that a child is uniquely wrapped up in the domestic cult and, in particular, is connected with the deity. The domestic-cultic value of children forms the much broader understanding of children in the ancient world, through which other more problematic representations can be tested. Throughout the study, it becomes apparent that children’s value in the domestic cult is an intentional catalyst for the social promotion of YHWHism.

This book bases its title on a joke by Groucho Marx who said (approximately, accounts differ) “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member”—a line that encapsulates one of the most important characteristics of Jewish humor: the desire to distance oneself from a group to which one feels superior and in this way to forge a path to emotional freedom. By studying the history and development of Jewish humor, the chapters in this book provide nuanced accounts of how Jewish humor can be described, but also makes a case for the importance of humor in studying any culture. A recent survey showed that about four in ten American Jews felt that “having a good sense of humor” was “an essential part of what being Jewish means to them,” on a par with or exceeding caring for Israel, observing Jewish law, and eating traditional foods. As these chapters show, Jewish humor has served many functions as a form of “insider” speech. It has been used to ridicule; to unite people in the face of their enemies; to challenge authority; to deride politics and politicians; in America, to ridicule conspicuous consumption and diminished American Jewish masculinity and masculine Jewish women; in Israel, to contrast expectations of political normalcy and bitter reality. However, much of contemporary Jewish humor is not designed only or even primarily as insider speech. Rather, it rewards all those who get the punch line.

Comedy is both relative, linked to a time and culture, and universal, found pervasively across time and culture. The Hebrew Bible contains comedy of this relative, yet universal, nature. This book engages the Hebrew Bible via a comic reading and brings that reading into conversation with feminist‐critical interpretation, in resistance to any lingering stereotype that comedy is fundamentally non‐serious or that feminist critique is fundamentally unsmiling. Dividing comic elements into categories of literary devices, psychological/social features, and psychological/social function, this work examines the narratives of a number of biblical characters for evidence of these comic elements. The characters include the trickster matriarchs, the women involved in the infancy of Moses, Rahab, Deborah and Jael, Delilah, three of David's wives (Michal, Abigail, Bathsheba), Jezebel, Ruth, and Esther. Nine particularly instructive points of contact between comedy and feminist interpretation emerge: both resist definition, exist amid a self/other, subject/object dichotomy, emphasize and utilize context, promote creativity, acknowledge the concept of distancing, work towards revelation, are subversive, are concerned with containment and control, and enable survival. The use of comedy as an interpretative lens for the Hebrew Bible is not without difficulties for feminist interpretation. While maintaining an uncomfortable, even painful, awareness of the hold patriarchy retains on the Hebrew Bible, feminist critics can still choose to allow comedy's revelatory, subversive, survivalist nature to do its work revealing, subverting, and surviving.

The ʾOr ha-Sekhel of Abraham ben Asher (Venice, 1567) is of great importance in the history of the study of midrash. It is the first book in which Genesis Rabba was accompanied by commentaries, one spuriously attributed to Rashi and the other written by Abraham ben Asher himself. In the mid-sixteenth century, writing commentaries on midrashim was something of a novelty; immediate precedents are hard to identify. Yet the ʾOr ha-Sekhel was among the first of a new outpouring of such expositions. The need for correct texts and explanations of obscure vocabulary was foremost in the minds of interpreters such as Issachar Berman of Poland. However, the importance of midrash in the sermons of the Iberian immigrants to the Ottoman Empire inspired the composition of more discursive commentaries. An analysis of Abraham ben Asher’s expositions shows that his interpretations should be seen in this latter context. By publishing homiletic discourses on midrashim in the ʾOr ha-Sekhel along with a medieval commentary attributed to Rashi, Abraham ben Asher grounded his innovative endeavour to expound Genesis Rabba in the work of the most celebrated commentator on the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. He thereby presented this midrash as a text requiring dedicated study and the guidance of learned commentators. By printing the text of Genesis Rabba along with two commentaries in the ʾOr ha-Sekhel, Abraham ben Asher provided readers with a comprehensive resource to accomplish this task.

This book examines ancient Jewish thought with regard to Jewish identity construction, circumcision, and conversion. It argues that there is no evidence in the Hebrew Bible that circumcision was considered to be a rite of conversion to Israelite religion. The infant circumcision that was practiced within Israelite and early Jewish society, and was demanded by Genesis 17, excluded from the covenant those not properly descended from Abraham. In the Second Temple period many Jews did begin to conceive of Jewishness in terms that enabled Gentiles to become Jews. Nonetheless, some Jews, especially the author of Jubilees, found this definition of Jewishness problematic, and they defended the borders of Jewishness by reasserting a strictly genealogical conception of Jewish identity. Consequently, some Gentiles who underwent conversion to Judaism in this period faced criticism because of their suspect ethnicity. Second Temple Jewish sources record such exclusion with regard to the Herodians, who were Idumean converts. This examination of the way in which Jews in the Second Temple period perceived circumcision and conversion provides a better understanding of early Christianity as the book of Acts portrays it. The final chapter demonstrates how careful attention to a definition of Jewishness that was based on genealogical descent has implications for understanding the disputes over the early Christian mission to the Gentiles.