The book Mah Nishtannah: The Passover Night in the Sages' Discourse seeks to provide novel answers, based upon up-to-date methods of scholarly Talmud analysis, to ancient questions raised by the Seder Night, a night at the focus of Jewish culture from time immemorial. The book analyzes the focal points of this night – the Passover meal and its commandments on one hand, and the foundation of the Haggadah and the development of its design and history of its structure on the other.

Table of Contents: David Henshke - Directing Prayer toward the Holy Place : the Plain Meaning of the Mishnah and Its Echoes in Talmudic Literature Baruch J. Schwartz - R. Judah Heḥasid’s Commentary on Genesis 48:20 Shalem Yahalom - Tosafot Sens: Editions and Characteristics Yaron Ben-Naeh - An Unknown Sabbatean Document Gideon Freudenthal - Salomon Maimon's Development from Kabbalah to Philosophical Rationalism

This book examines the Rabbinic perception of the biblical commandment of pilgrimage-related joy - “You shall rejoice on your festival” - from the Second Temple through the tannaitic-amoraic period. Close analysis of the sources discloses an edifice of early tannaitic halakhah concerning the festivals and pinpoints the development of its underlying conceptual-exegetical approach from early teachings to its present form.

In this path breaking book, Yaron Ben-Naeh describes and analyzes for the first time in scholarly literature the Jewish Society in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, in Anatolia and in the Arab provinces. It focuses on the 17th century, the period which shaped and molded Ottoman Jewry as such. The book is solidly based on a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, among them Ottoman documents which the author has found and deciphered. The chapters of the book deal with various aspects of communal life, family life and social dynamics, with special relation to city life and the surrounding Muslim society and acculturation processes which had made it into the core of sephardi Jewry.