In consultation with Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940) treated the first Jewish cleric known to undergo analysis, in 1903. According to the case history, published in 1908, a forty-two-year-old rabbi suffered from a Berufsneurose, an occupational neurosis associated with the pressures of his career. Stekel's case history forms an indelible portrait of a religious patient who submitted himself to the highly experimental treatment of psychoanalysis in the early years of the discipline. However, scholars never integrated the rabbi's case into the social history of psychoanalysis, more as a consequence of Freud's professional disparagement of Stekel than of the case history's original reception. Psychoanalytic historiography has largely dismissed Stekel's legacy, resulting in a lack of serious scholarly consideration of his prodigious publications compared to the attention paid to the work of some of Freud's other disciples. Stekel's most recent biographers, however, credit him as the “unsung populariser of psychoanalysis,” and claim that he is due for reconsideration. But in his published case history of the rabbi, Stekel also warrants introduction to the field of Jewish studies, not only because of the literary treatment of the rabbinical profession by a secular Jewish psychoanalyst, but also because the rabbi incorporated aspects of that experience into his own intellectual framework after treatment.

Saul Lieberman has shown that various aspects of Greco-Roman culture were pervasive not only among more Hellenized Jews of the first centuries CE, but that even “the Rabbis of Palestine were familiar with the fashionable style of the civilized world of that time. Many of them were highly educated in Greek literature. … They spoke to the people in their language and in their style.” An integral part of this culture involved the study of rhetoric, a staple of higher education throughout the Roman Empire.

In his seminal essay “Jewish-Americans, Go Home” (1964), Leslie Fiedler attacked postwar Jewish writing and its widespread use of what he controversially labeled “crypto-Jewish characters,”

The painted decoration in the Dura-Europos synagogue (Syria, 244–245 CE) is the most extensive surviving example of Jewish pictorial narrative in the ancient world. In its final stage, the decoration consisted of three bands of narrative panels that surrounded all four walls of the synagogue's assembly hall and led up to the Torah shrine at the center of the west wall (Figure 1). Imagery related to the Jerusalem Temple, including a symbolic image of the Temple on the Torah shrine, made up a significant part of the decoration of the Dura synagogue. There is, however, considerable scholarly disagreement as to how this imagery should be interpreted, particularly as part of a “programmatic” structure. Because the Temple image on the Torah shrine was positioned at the liturgical focal point of the synagogue and was created before the other surrounding narrative panels, the function of this image is a key component of the synagogue's decoration as a whole. Two contextualizing factors would have informed the function and meaning of the image: the reception of the image as part of the liturgical activity carried out by the congregation, and the place of the image as the conclusion to the middle level of surrounding narrative panels that depicted the journey of the Ark of the Covenant from Sinai to Zion. This narrative helped to situate the members of the congregation in relation to the Temple image, defining the community's active role as a part of the narrative itself.

The legal theorist and classicist James Boyd White argues for an understanding of law as a rhetorical activity through which meaning and communities are created. While law contains rules, its definition should not be limited to those rules. Rather, law is a literary and compositional activity, one of our social modes through which we aim to constitute community. Significantly, for White, law is a cultural activity, a language, one of the ways in which we shape and give meaning to our world. The written records of classical rabbinic culture, the Talmuds and the midrashim, present us with an example of this world in which law is a cultural and rhetorical mode of expression. In fact, as these texts, and the Talmuds in particular, usually do not present us with codified rules but rather artfully construed discussions, models of “thinking” about a particular legal decision, they are excellent examples of the ways in which the creation of law is the creation of meaning. Classical rabbinic literature presents us with a textual world of law and narrative, a weaving of one genre into the other, and a use of one genre in the service of the other. Rabbinic texts often inform us precisely which stories the rabbis choose to utilize for specific norms. Law does not exist in its own bordered realm, but is part of a larger web of meaning in which it and narrative together create behavioral claims. A claim to legal authority, therefore, is not only a claim about which stories are authoritative, but also a claim to a specific understanding of a tradition, a move toward narratival authority.

Now is an appropriate time to reconsider the historiographical benefit that a comparative study of the East Syrian (“Nestorian”) schools and the Babylonian rabbinic academies may offer. This is attributable both to the recent, rapid increase in scholarship on Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire and late antiquity more broadly, and to the return by some scholars of rabbinic Judaism to the issues of a scholarly exchange of the late 1970s and early 1980s about the nature of rabbinic academic institutionalization. Furthermore, over the past twenty years, scholars of classics, Greek and Roman history, and late antiquity have significantly added to the bibliography on the transmission of knowledge—in lay person's terms, education—in the Greco-Roman and early Christian worlds. Schools continue to be an intense topic of conversation, and my own recent work on the School of Nisibis and the East Syrian schools in general suggests that the transformations and innovations of late antiquity also occurred in the Sasanian Empire, at a great distance from the centers of classical learning, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Antioch. The recently reexamined East Syrian sources may help push the conversation about rabbinic academic institutionalization forward. However, the significance of this issue is not simply attributable to its bearing on the social and institutional history of rabbinic institutions. Such inquiry may also reflect on how we understand the Babylonian Talmud and on the difficult redaction history of its constituent parts. Furthermore, I hope that the discussion offered herein will contribute to the ongoing analysis of the late antique creation and formalization of cultures of learning, which were transmitted, in turn, into the Eastern (i.e., Islamic and “Oriental” Christian and Jewish) and Western Middle Ages within their corresponding communities.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Rabbi Ya‘akov Landa was one of some 250,000 Russian Jews who had fled, or been forcibly expelled, from their homes in Russia's western provinces to settle in the country's interior. After Landa's exile, he spent several months traveling amid refugee communities in Voronezh, Tambov, Penza, Saratov, and Samara provinces. At the conclusion of his journey, he composed a detailed report about the state of religious observance among the refugees, which he sent to Rabbi Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson of Lubavitch. Landa's observations during these months shocked his core sensibilities as a rabbi and an observant Jew. He noted that refugees were disregarding such fundamental aspects of Jewish practice as Sabbath observance and were living without the basic institutions that had traditionally defined religious and communal life.

The targums to the Pentateuch have often been called a kind of translation literature. In part, this is due to the lexicography of the term targum, according to which this literature is known. Although this association between targumic literature and the term translation has been long-standing, “translation,” as it has been used in the field of targum studies, is greatly undertheorized. Within recent years, scholars have used the word translation to describe the interlinguistic rendering of specific Hebrew Bible words and phrases. Some discussion has been given to the complexities of this dynamic in the targums, but the meaning of the term translation has yet to be addressed explicitly. In this article, I propose that to use translation as a meaningful descriptive category for targumic literature, it is necessary to unpack it and examine its ambiguities and problematic status even within the context of discussions about translation studies. By exploring the contours of this term, I hope to indicate how a more nuanced understanding of “translation” can help describe the targumic genre, as well as the targums' underlying hermeneutic orientation toward the Hebrew Bible.

Of all the varieties of modern Jewish politics, none has experienced a more curious fate than Diaspora Nationalism. This nonterritorial strain of Jewish nationalism, also known as Autonomism, was once widely regarded as “together with Zionism the most important political expression of the Jewish people in the modern era.” From its fin-de-siècle origins in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, it spread rapidly across Eastern Europe, sprouting various movements for Jewish national-cultural autonomy. After World War II, however, Diaspora Nationalism vanished almost overnight. So too was its intellectual afterlife marked by silence, as postwar historians of Jewish political thought largely ignored its legacy. Recently, however, Diaspora Nationalism has emerged as a growing field of scholarship. The results are impressive: a striking new wave of studies on its intellectual leadership, political parties, cultural projects, and various interwar East European Autonomist experiments. This abundance of fresh research promises to reframe not only the history of Diaspora Nationalism, but also that of Zionism and Jewish nationalism more generally.

This study seeks to explain the origin of the fast of the 13th of Adar. The practice of fasting on this day is puzzling for a number of reasons. Although the Bible describes fasting in the year of the Purim threat, this fast occurred in Nissan and the weeks thereafter. Nor does tannaitic or amoraic literature mention the practice of fasting on the 13th of Adar. To add to the puzzle, Megillat ta‘anit, compiled in the first century ce, includes the 13th of Adar as a day on which Jews were prohibited from fasting.

In the last several decades, the study of reading, writing, and publishing has emerged as a lively field of inquiry in the humanities and social sciences. Historians and literary scholars have engaged with a number of questions about the impact of changes in technology on reading practices and particularly on the relationship between new technologies of reading and writing and social, religious, and political change. The new field of the “history of the book,” merging aspects of social and intellectual history with the tools of analytical and descriptive bibliography, came to the fore in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time that the emergence of new forms of electronic media raised many questions for social scientists about the ways that technological change have affected aspects of human communication in our time. Meanwhile, while the field of book history emerged initially among early modernists interested in the impact of printing technology, the issues raised regarding authorship, publication, relations between orality and the written word, dissemination, and reception have enriched the study of earlier periods.

The complicated process whereby the biblical books took shape and were copied and transmitted in biblical times can only be partly reconstructed based on biblical evidence, with the help of ancient Near Eastern parallels. Clearly, the biblical era constitutes the first stage in the history of the Jewish book, or more correctly, the Jewish book par excellence. However, for the period immediately following, the Second Temple period, the level of documentation for creating, editing/redacting, and copying and disseminating Jewish books is now enormous due to the discovery, publication, and analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls. While this information relates directly to the period in which the Scrolls were copied, from the last part of the third century bce through the early first century ce, it also allows us a model with which to supplement our understanding of the biblical period, and much of it is directly relevant to the rabbinic period in which most of the same scribal conventions were in use.

Moritz Steinschneider opened the greatest monument in the study of Hebrew bibliography, his Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, with the following statement: