The book explores the representations and depictions of old age in the rabbinic Jewish literature of late antiquity. Through close literary readings and cultural analysis, the book reveals the gaps and tensions between idealized images of old age on the one hand, and the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging on the other hand. The authors argue that while rabbinic literature presents various statements on the qualities and activities that make for good old age, on the respect and reverence that the elderly should be awarded, and on harmonious intergenerational relationship, it also includes multiple anecdotes and narratives that portray aging in much more nuanced and poignant ways. These anecdotes and narratives relate, alongside fantasies about blissful or unnoticeable aging, a host of fears associated with old age: from the loss of physical capability and beauty to the loss of memory and mental acuity, and from marginalization in the community to being experienced as a burden by one’s own children. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of aging in the rabbinic world: bodily appearance and sexuality, family relations, intellectual and cognitive prowess, honor and shame, and social roles and identity.

In this issue: Avishai Bar-Asher | The Earliest Extant Version of Sefer Yesirah Tamar Kadari | Thousands unto Solomon: The Relationship Between Midrash Kohelet Rabbah and Midrash Shir Hashirim Rabbah Elyashiv Cherlow and Adiel Breuer | Remnants of ‘Maʿasim Livne Ereẓ Yira’el’ Written on a Scroll

From this volume: Emanuel Tov | The Septuagint Translation of the Torah Was Based on Palestinian Sources Sholomo Bahar | Circular Patterns in Biblical Thought Ariel Kopilovitz | Regalia Deformed and Restored: Ezekiel’s View of Israel’s Future Leadership Rama Manor, Avi Gvura and Pnina Tromer | The Verb Lekh in the Bible: From a Verb of Motion to Urging of Action Mordechai Weintraub | A New Page of ‘Sefer Tagey’ from the Cairo Genizah Yigal Bloch | ʾEzrāḥ: and Dĕrôr: Two Instances of Assyrian Linguistic Influence in the Holiness Code and Nili Samet | The Origin of the Day of Yahweh Tradition: A New Suggestion

This book untangles a web of ideas about politics, religion, exile, and community that emerged at a key moment in Jewish history and left a lasting mark on Jewish ideas. In the shadow of their former member Baruch Spinoza’s notoriety, and amid the aftermath of the Sabbatian messianic movement, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam underwent a conceptual shift that led them to treat their self-governed diaspora community as a commonwealth. Preoccupied by the question of why and how Jews should rule themselves in the absence of a biblical or messianic sovereign state or king, they forged a creative synthesis of insights from early modern Christian politics and Jewish law and traditions to assess and argue over their formidable communal government. In so doing they shaped a proud new theopolitical self-understanding of their community as analogous to a Christian state. Through readings of rarely studied sermons, commentaries, polemics, administrative records, and architecture, Anne Albert shows that a concentrated period of public Jewish political discourse among the community’s leaders and thinkers led to the formation of a strong image of itself as a totalizing, state-like entity—an image that eventually came to define its portrayal by twentieth-century historians. Her study presents a new perspective on a Jewish population that has long fascinated readers, as well as new evidence of Jewish reactions to Spinoza and Sabbatianism, and analyses the first Jewish reckoning with modern western political concepts.

In this issue: Sharon Weisser | ‘Is it Good to be Healthy?’ Philo as a Participant in the Ancient Debates about the Kinds of Goods Colten Cheuk-Yin Yam | Philo’s Knowledge of Medicine in his Later Roman Writings Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss | ‘What Shall I Leave for Old Age’: The Old and the Young in the Rabbinic Study House Avigail Manekin-Bamberger | Healing and Protection in Rabbinic Liturgy and in the Jewish Aramaic Incantation Bowls Warren Zev Harvey | Ibn Daud, Ibn Matut, and the Secret of the Garment Assaf Tamari | ‘Like … the Proficient Physician’: On the Tradition of the Physicians of the Soul, and Lurianic Kabbalah’s Uniqueness within it Jonathan Garb | The Somatic Medical Model in Or ha-Torah by R. Itzhak Eizik Haver

In this issue: Shira Shmidman | The Textual Witnesses of Tosefta Yevamot: New Finding in Light of the Cairo Genizah Fragments Gideon Bohak | I Beg You: Appeals to Angels in the Talmudic and Gaonic Periods Avishai Bar-Asher | The Bahir as It Once was: Transmission History as a Tool for Reconstructing and Reassesing the Text, Format, and Ideas of the Original Composition

Written in Arabic in the first half of the ninth century, Twenty Chapters is the first medieval Jewish philosophical work, and had a major influence on the development of Jewish theological and philosophical thought. Dawūd al-Muqammaṣ, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who wrote this theological Summa after his return to Judaism, also authored the first Judeo-Arabic Bible commentaries, and some of the earliest Judeo-Arabic polemical works. The annotated Hebrew translation of this pioneering work, published here for the first time, presents al-Muqammaṣ in his intellectual and historical context and throws light on his Jewish, Muslim and Christian background.

In this issue: Chaim Milikowsky | The Transformation of Traditions and the Creation of Variant Readings in Vayyiqra Rabba Chapter 25 Sections 1-2 – Preceding and Succeeding the Redactorial Moment Shulamit Elizur | 'The birth of poems' – Deliberations on the Conception of the Poem and Longings for Zion in a Previously Unknown Piyyut by R. Judah Halevi Judith Weiss | The Sefer Yetzira Commentary Attributed to Isaac the Blind: Evidence Supporting Its Early Dating, Its Central Status among Thirteenth century Kabbalists and the Validity of Its Attribution to Isaac the Blind Simcha Emanuel | Rashba’s Responsa to North African Sages Israel Ori Meitlis | The Place of Izhbitza-Radzin Thought in the Tekhelet writings of the Radziner Rebbe

This volume is the first attempt at broad and deep research from a gender perspective into the halakhic attitude towards abortion. With the argument that halakhah reflects the male outlook and the consequent gender biases taken as its starting point, it examines the influence of gender concepts on contemporary halakhic rulings about abortion, in light of bio-ethical, conservative, liberal, and feminist theories, as well as the ideas of feminist legal theory and the feminist critique of the reigning epistemology. The book analyzes the gender implications of the stringent halakhic rulings of the twentieth century and the way they construct women. It asserts that the halakhic stance that takes the ban on abortion as a Torah-based prohibition constricts the idea of the sanctity of life to biological terms only and thereby highlights the reduction of women to mainly an entity for reproduction. The research raises a number of questions that have never been asked before: How do the decision makers see the female essence in general, and specifically in the context of abortion? Where do the woman’s needs rank on the scale of the decision makers' considerations? Are women perceived as subjects with their own interests and will—or are these deemed irrelevant and appropriated for the benefit of the collective (the family, the Jewish people)? These questions serve as the foundation for the discussion in the present volume. Even though it deals mainly with abortion, I suggest that it be seen as demonstrating the masculine identity of the halakhic discourse in general.

The Shema prayer is, among other things, the demand to understand. Prominent thinkers such as Saadia Gaon, Bahya ibn Paquda and the Rambam all made tremendous efforts to understand it, which were highly controversial. This controversy pushed aside the discussion of the uniqueness of God, which ended up in the field of the history of ideas. This book is an attempt to revive the metaphysical reading of the uniqueness of God, while addressing these controversies. It offers a explanation of Shema, which is loyal to the constitutive Jewish sources on the one hand and in dialogue with modern thought on the other.

In this issue: Hillel Mali | Ritual Leftovers and the Tannaitic Perceptions of Holiness Idan Pinto | Universe – Sanctuary – Man: On a Threefold Analogy in Two Anonymous Texts and their Traces in Thirteenth century Kabbalah Yudith Weiss | Isaac of Acre’s Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah Commentary Attributed to Isaac the Blind: Research and Edition Haviva Pedaya | Kabbalah Out of Context: On the Erasure of the Provençal School in Kabbalah Research