The Israel Folktale Archive (IFA), named after founder Dov Noy, was established in 1955 aiming to protect oral traditions at danger of becoming extinct or sinking into oblivion. It currently stores some 25,000 stories told in dozens of ethnic groups, mostly Jewish but also Muslim, Christian and Druze. Poetic Memory deals with the appearance of early Hebrew traditions in the archive tales, from the days of the Bible to the Middle Ages.

Ever Turning Blows the Wind examines the cultural world of Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulay - Hida (Jerusalem 1724 - Livorno 1806). This book explores the cultural and intellectual figure of Hida, a native of Jerusalem, who spent many years traveling in North Africa and Europe until he settled in Livorno, Italy. It examines several of his numerous works, representing various genres. The defining aspects of his character, emerge from Hida's writings. The expressions of his self-image, his attitude towards different societies and cultures and different bodies of knowledge, influenced by the cultural spaces he crossed in his travels, are discussed here. Examination of Hida’s writings, with their various genres, shows that Hida’s figure contains some of the old, traditional world where he was born and raised and formed his personality, and the modern world which was discovered to him in his travels and which aroused his interest and its effects on him are clearly evident in his writings. Therefore, the research of Hida’s figure enables an examination of the influence of the new inside the traditional surroundings and the existence of these two entities side by side.

Empathy is often conceptualized as the experience of walking in someone else’s shoes. This experience comprises of a cognitive aspect – the ability to identify, understand and adopt the perspective of another, and an affective aspect – sharing the emotions of others, while remaining distinct. Empathy has been widely recognized as central to cognitive and social development, and a key to nurturing interpersonal relationships and encouraging pro-social action. But empathy has drawbacks as well: Its boundaries, limitations and even potential damage have also been recognized and investigated. The articles in this book take multiple perspectives to studying empathy. They discuss how empathy is developed and how it is bounded, and focus on both its positive and negative implications. The articles in the first part of the book take a social sciences perspective to empathy. They define empathy, describe its development from very early age and throughout the life-span, and examine how it affects intra-personal, interpersonal and social processes. The second part of the book discusses the role of empathy in the humanities. The articles in this part address empathy in history, literature and the arts. Together, the articles in this book point to the vast scope of empathy as a phenomenon in both the social sciences and the humanities.

In this issue: Ohad Abudraham | A New Reading of a Mandaic Incantation Bowl in the Miami University Art Museum Erhard Blum | A “Neglected” Aramaic Dialect: The Literary Idiom of the Kingdom of Aram-Damascus Moshe Bar-Asher | Problems in the Description of the Morphology of Mishnaic Hebrew Haim Dihi | Some Linguistic Innovations in the Book of Ben Sira: The Contribution of MS F from the Cairo Geniza Shai Heijmans | Pretonic Reduction of Greek Loanwords in the Mishna and Its Significance And more...

In the preface to his book Emek Hamelech Rabbi Naftali Bacharach lists his ten books, noting that the first is Emek Hamelech , and the second is Gan ha-Melekh , his commentary on the Zohar printed here for the first time. Bacharach's style in Emek Hamelech is similar to his style in Gan Hamelech , however, while Emek Hamelech was written according to the order of Emanation, Gan Hamelech was written as a commentary to the Zohar. In general, the Kabbalistic writing of Bacharach is characterized by the fact that it is full of messianic tension, and unlike most descriptions of the Emanation in Lurianic Kabbalah that we are familiar with, Bacharach also describes the first stages of the Emanation in Messianic terms.

The book Registers of Ashkenazi Communities in Italy from the 18th Century presents a scientific edition of three files documenting customs in Ashkenazi communities in the north of Italy in the 18th century, from Trieste, from Mantua and Padova, with an introduction and indices. The world of Halacha in Italy, starting from the beginning of the Rishonim period, was influenced by different centers, and was not an independent center. Ashkenazi Judaism had a decisive influence on Italy beginning in the 13th century. Files documenting customs of Ashkenazi communities existed already in the 11th century and continued to be written throughout the generations in the Ashkenazi communities. However, files documenting the customs of Ashkenazi communities on Italian soil were relatively few. The book before us hence makes up a little for this lack. It is true that the writing of files documenting customs is an Ashkenazi phenomenon, we have found it among Ashkenazi people in all generations, but in the 17th-18th centuries, which are documented by the files before us, the Jewish communities in Ashkenaz and in Italy were subject to the influence of important historical processes, such as heated rabbinic polemics, the beginning of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and its cultural and political effects and the emancipation processes. These processes had a profound impact on the Jewish world and we find echoes of this impact in the custom files as well. The certificates published here were written at a unique historical, cultural and religious junction, and have great significance in all these fields.

Problems of Discipline explores the social and cultural function of the state system of secondary education in the Russian empire’s north-western provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. It shows how schools facilitated socialization into informal, yet non-radical forms of political and social activism, and demonstrates, furthermore, how ideas of civil activism and communal commitment, typical to the contemporary Russian critical public discourse, led to the creation of a distinctive Jewish student subculture which contributed, subsequently, to the emergence of a new socially committed Jewish-Russian elite. Thus Problems of Discipline suggests a new conceptualization of the emergence of local – Jewish and other – elites and, in a broader view, a new understanding of the modes of Russian imperial socialization.

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

Tens of thousands of intellectuals - refugees, displaced people, voluntary immigrants and emissaries - have left their homeland in modern times and moved to other countries in Europe and overseas. In a world-wide panorama, Peter Burke describes the important figures in the great waves of immigration since the fifteenth century: starting with the Greeks who came to Italy following the conquest of Byzantium by the Ottomans and ending with those fleeing from the Bolsheviks, the Fascists and the Nazis in the twentieth century. The migrations in the early modern period were mostly for religious reasons - for example, the Jews and Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula, the Huguenots (French Calvinists) following the cancellation of the Edict of Nantes, and Catholics from Protestant countries. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the migrations were mainly due to racial persecution and political and ideological reasons. Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge clarifies the difficulties of the scholars to integrate in the host countries and the choice between assimilation and seclusion in the expatriate community. But mainly he came to point out the enormous contribution of expatriates and immigrants to the creation of new knowledge and its dissemination, not only in immigration countries such as the United States and Israel, but in the entire world - from China in the East to Brazil in the West. Burke especially discusses the contribution of scholars in the humanities and social sciences: historians, researchers of the history of art and literature, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists. Besides academics who managed to integrate into universities in the host countries, there were also other cultural mediators: printers and publishers, translators, merchants who settled for many years in distant lands, missionaries and scholars who were invited to the courts of rulers who sought to advance their country to modernity. The damage caused by the "brain drain" from the countries of origin eclipsed the gains produced by the world of knowledge as a whole: liberation from provincialism, bridging traditions, mutual fertilization. The detailed review in Peter Burke's book, which was written in 2015 as a warning against Brexit (Britain's exit from the European Union), is intended to convey a very important message even today: the reception of immigrants and refugees enriches the local and global culture and is the main antidote against the depletion of the spirit and narrow horizons.

After the Second World War, Poland experienced a radical transformation of its regime, a dramatic change of its borders and a large-scale resettlement of its population. The emergent Polish state lost its Eastern provinces to the Soviet Union and obtained areas east of the Oder-Neisse line as a compensation. Between 1945 and 1947, the vast majority of the German residents were expelled from the newly annexed territories, which were repopulated with Polish citizens, including around 100,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. This book focuses on the first two years of this resettlement in Lower Silesia, and illuminates how Poles and Jews dealt with the material heritage left behind by the Germans. Pointing to the importance of material culture for the political and individual sense of belonging, the book offers a new perspective on the formation of Polish society after 1945.

Leon Kellner was part of the intellectual and cultural elite of imperial Austria. Engaged in politics, a member of his regional parliament, and an essayist of repute, he was also a Zionist leader and confidant of Theodor Herzl. He created an institution for Jews’ cultural, educational, and social advancement modelled on London’s Toynbee Hall, which spread across east-central Europe to great effect. He was also an internationally recognized Shakespeare scholar. Yet for all this, today he is little known. How did someone born into a lower-middle-class Orthodox Jewish family from the province of Galicia come to gain such prominence in the Habsburg empire? Kellner’s is a thoroughly Habsburg Jewish story, spanning east and west and shaped by the empire’s history, politics, and culture. He was a singular character: a Galician Jew at home in Vienna and in Czernowitz, eyes towards Zion, yet content also in London, and never more so than when absorbed in the minutiae of Shakespeare’s texts. Kellner’s world was destroyed twice over: Habsburg Austria came to an end in 1918, east-central European Jewry in 1945. This biography recovers at least part of what was lost.

The essay presents the lost archive of the Jewish author Zalman Shneour (Shklov 1887 – New York 1950). It was found in May 2018 at Calle Eraso 21 in Madrid – the city through which he had passed in the summer of 1941. Four carton boxes survived in the apartment of his late daughter, Renee Rebecca Shneour, who fled to New York together with her father but returned to live in Madrid in her adulthood. The essay offers a reading of Shneour's correspondences with three women - his mother in Shklov, his friend and lover in Berlin, and his daughter.