The justification of plans and programs is a necessary condition of the relationship between systems of education, both obligatory and voluntary, and the publics they serve. Those who are responsible for the conduct of the educational enterprise in general and the schooling of the young in particular must provide those who support the system, financially and otherwise, with acceptable and defensible reasons for the efforts and activities of the schools. The idea of justification in education rests on the assumption that the process of schooling, whatever its form and content, is subject to rational control and that the authority for the conduct of schools is derived from the principles inherent in the justification offered. A proferred justification is most effective and likely of acceptance when the positions it generates on educational issues fit the general fabric of ideals and aspirations of the society to which it is addressed. If, as we believe, justification is a necessary part of the rhetoric which surrounds legislatively determined and state maintained school systems—i.e., systems whose right to existence is not subject to question or doubt in any modern society and where attendance is required by law—then it follows that it is of even greater significance for voluntary school systems which lack the coercive power of their governmental counterparts—i.e., Jewish education.

Recently, I had the pleasure of visiting the representational realist painter Israel Hershberg in his Jerusalem studio, where he was busy working on a small painting, one of a series of “tree portraits.” It was an exquisite work, in which each dappling of light on every needle of a towering cypress was exactingly represented on a miniature scale. But I was startled to see that, while he had blocked out the shape of the tree and the general parameters of light and shade “in the wild,” this champion of rendering from life was actually completing most of the painting in the studio. At first I thought the tree must be outside the window, or that he must be working from a photograph, but when I asked him where the detailing was coming from, he tapped his finger to his forehead.

This article describes a little noticed process among the Jews of theMiddle East and North Africa, in which an initially open response tomodernity was replaced among some religious leaders by marked oppositionto it. The result is a more nuanced view of the cultural/spiritual livesof these important communities.

This study examines Rabbi Yehuda Hayyûj′s (945–1000 C.E.) use of two derivational processes: underlying forms and linguistic analogies (singular: Arabic Hebrew ), which were an integral element of his work. Since his goal was to show the derivation of Hebrew verbs from triliteral roots, he focused on weak verbs whose surface forms did not demonstrate all three radicals. He compared many weak verbs to other verbal forms in order to identify the exact inflection of words, especially their verbal pattern and consonantal roots.

King Herod ruled Judea from 37 to 4 bce. His life and achievements are described in detail in the writings of Flavius Josephus and have been explored in numerous historical studies. In rabbinic literature, however, mention of Herod's image and achievements is scarce. The few sources that do exist are very brief, with the exception of one significant source in the Babylonian Talmud (henceforth: BT), which will be discussed in this article.

This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan, using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography. Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?

Not otherwise known as a bright era for the Jews of Christian Europe, the late fourteenth century nonetheless counted a number of thriving Jewish medical careers. One physician who surfaced in this period was Jacob b. Solomon of Avignon (sometimes called Jacob b. Solomon haTzarfati), whose career has been documented in two cities. In northern France, the land of his ancestors, we find him in the 1370s in the orbit of the University of Paris and its prestigious medical faculty. By the early 1380s, however, Jacob was at the papal court in Avignon, where or near where he was raised. There, in his own day at least, he achieved some renown while serving as physician to Pope Clement VII's brother, Count Pierre of Geneva.

Literary approaches to rabbinic literature entered the field through biblical studies, in which scholars from different quarters and different points of reference were using them to make sense of the biblical text as it has come down to us. The literary approach took umbrage at the way in which the historical source-critical approach dissects the Bible into its constituent sources. The literary approach was an overt attempt to overcome the fractures that historical criticism had introduced into the surface of the biblical text. It proposed instead to read the text—with all of its surface irregularities, gaps, and hiatuses—as coherent and meaningful.

When in 1981 the Israeli Cameri Theater performed The Passion of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin, the leading avant-garde playwrightin Israel (viewed by some as “the bad boy of the modern Israeli stage”),1 public outrage reached unprecedented heights.The scandal was partially provoked by Levin′s staging.His taste for the carnal and the cruel was much too unpalatable for many stomachs to digest.“People actually walked out, while others covered their eyes,” reported a review in the Jerusalem Post.2 No less detrimental, however, was the specific angle from which Levin th? playwright elected to retell the biblical story.For although the Hebrew title of the play, Yisurei Iyov, may be literally rendered as “Job′s Afflictions,” our translation was advisedly chosen: In his version, Levin catapults Job from the fictional land of Uz to Palestine of the Roman era, thereby embedding Job′s ordeal in that later agon between man and God–the passion of Christ.Accordingly, this dramatized Job does not live to hear an answer from the whirlwind, nor does he see his life redeemed.With a dramatic sleight of hand he is, paradoxically enough, the only character in the play who refuses to deny the existence of God–thus condemning himself to the stake.

The various versions of the story about the daughter of Nakdimon ben Gurion may be used to explain two phenomena: (a) the story as a hermeneutic device, by which the very act of presenting the verse as part of the story imparts to it a new meaning, which differs not only from the peshaf (plain meaning), but also from the other exegeses of the sages concerning this same verse and (b) the modification that results in this new meaning because of the diversities in the different versions of the story.

In the introduction to his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides provides us with a rationale for the composition of this work as well as instructions for the targeted reader on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style. Such devices as contradiction, diffuse and seemingly discordant treatment of subject matter, and deliberate ruses are employed to accommodate both halakhic legal constraints on the overt teaching of physics and metaphysics and the wide intellectual disparity of his potential readers. The sensitive nature of the topics to be explored demands an unorthodox pedagogy that both illuminates and conceals, allowing entrance to the qualified few while excluding those who cannot cope with the intellectual rigors involved. Rabbinic stricture prohibits revealing anything more of the Account of the Chariot (metaphysics) than chapter headings, and therefore Maimonides cautions, “my purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed so as not to oppose that divine purpose which has concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths requisite for His apprehension.”

In the mid-1930s, when the eminent Jewish historian Simon Dubnow began to publish his autobiography, he gave it the formidable title The Book of Life: Reminiscences and Reflections, Material for the History of My Time. Drawing not only on his memory, but on copious diaries and a prodigious literary output going back to the 1880s, Dubnow traced his journey from shtetl Judaism to Jewish nationalism—a journey typical (onemight almost say prototypical) of the late-nineteenth-century Russian Jewish intellectual's search for a new definition of himself as Jew and modern man. The substance of Dubnow's Book of Life frees the title from pretentiousness; more than a mere compilation, much of the autobiography (especially the first volume and a half) was an act of synthesis and integratsiia dushi (“self-integration”), two of Dubnow's favorite terms. My aim in this paper is to reflect anew on the process of Dubnow's self-integration, bridging the gap between a purely biographical approach and a purely ideological one in order to show how a distinctive nationalist stance crystallized out of Dubnow's personal growth. Nationalism was a hard-won, by no means self-evident solution to an overlapping sequence of emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Dubnow provides us with a picture of the groping that this self-transformation entailed, a picture that can be supplemented, and to a certain extent revised, by listening for resonances between life and thought undetected by Dubnow himself.