AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies最新文献

{"title":"The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought: Critical Essays by Jason Kalman (review)","authors":"Shira Weiss","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911534","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought: Critical Essays by Jason Kalman Shira Weiss Jason Kalman. The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought: Critical Essays. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2022. 605 pp. Jason Kalman’s The Book of Job in Jewish Life and Thought is a diverse collection of republished, revised, and new critical essays on Job, ranging from rabbinic, medieval, to modern perspectives on the biblical text. The author examines how Jewish readers in different times and places interpreted the book of Job and reconciled the conflict between how the relationship of God and humans was described regarding seeming injustices, as opposed to depictions of the divine-human relationship in other biblical books within the Jewish canon. As often with collected works, each essay stands alone as an independent analysis of a disparate aspect of the book of Job, spanning different genres, with minimal cohesion among the chapters. Few books, however, cover so many time periods in such a sophisticated manner, as works typically offer either focused analyses on a single theme, such as theodicy, providence, or protest, delve into a specific time period, or broadly trace the reception of a biblical character or book throughout history. Kalman’s work makes a meaningful scholarly contribution by presenting a historical study of the interpretation of Job from antiquity to contemporary times [End Page 452] in one volume, gathering and analyzing varied texts, including the Targum of Job, medieval mystical commentaries, as well as poems, sermons, legal codes, responsa, and polemical writings. Throughout history, the book of Job inspired literary creativity as its interpreters explored foundational philosophical and theological issues that arose in the text, including evil, divine providence, free will, and the pursuit of wisdom. Though discussed, these concepts are not the primary focus of this collection. Rather, each heavily footnoted chapter engages in a critical analysis of a far more nuanced topic relating to Job. The first five chapters consist of individual essays that deal with ideas regarding Mosaic authorship of the book of Job in rabbinic literature; exegetical traditions of the church fathers; Rashbam’s methodological challenges; the unity of Maimonides’s thought; and Soloveitchik’s modern application of Job, respectively. The final section of the work presents a typography of the evolution of interpreting Job from the rabbinic era to the sixteenth century, highlighting Job’s place in Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, medieval peshat (literary-contextual) commentaries, philosophical, Karaite, and Jewish mystical texts, anthological commentaries, and medieval art. The appendix offers an English translation of texts from Midrash ʾIyov, alluded to earlier in the final chapter. Despite disparity between chapter topics, each essay in Kalman’s collection elucidates a link in the exegetical chain of how Job was read throughout","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"24 7","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France by Nick Underwood (review)","authors":"Zoé Grumberg","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911543","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France by Nick Underwood Zoé Grumberg Nick Underwood. Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. 266 pp. In Yiddish Paris, Nick Underwood writes the biography of the “forgotten homeland of Yiddishist diaspora nationalism in Western Europe: France, and more specifically Paris” (1) in the interwar years. He studies several Yiddish cultural institutions, their members, and the performances, activities, and meetings they organized. If the book focuses mainly on Paris, which was the city where most Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe settled before and after the First World War, Underwood also briefly mentions cities such as Nancy, Metz, and Strasbourg. At that time, for many, France represented the country of human rights, of liberty, and, for leftists, of multiple revolutions. More specifically, for Jews, the emancipation of Jews in 1791 and the Dreyfus affair were major symbols. France was seen as a country that could be torn apart over the fate of a Jew. Fleeing from authoritarian regimes, antisemitism, and poverty, many east European Jews thus chose France and, more specifically, Paris. They brought with them a specific language and culture from eastern Europe. But this specific Yiddish culture was also shaped by the French context. As Underwood argues, these Jewish immigrants created an “alternative diasporic and French identity: Franco-Yiddishness” (6). The book is divided into five chapters that are five case studies: each focuses on a component of interwar Yiddish culture in Paris. In the first chapter, Underwood presents the institutionalization of Yiddish cultural life in Paris after World War I. He studies the Paris branch of the Kultur Lige, created in 1922. The Kultur Lige was originally founded in Kiev in 1918 by Yiddish cultural activists who wanted to create and extend high Yiddish culture. It was, at first, a nonpolitical institution. In France, it also started as an apolitical institution—or rather, an institution that united different political sensibilities, without being political itself—before being taken over by the Communists in 1925. The Kultur Lige was central in the building of a Yiddish community in Paris: it helped recent immigrants accommodate to their new life in France while sharing and maintaining their Yiddish culture through lectures, discussions, and various cultural gatherings. In the second chapter, Underwood turns to the Medem-farband, a cultural institution created in 1925 by Bundists and named after Vladimir Medem, a Bundist ideologue known [End Page 474] for his anti-Bolshevism and defense of the nation as a cultural form. Soon, a connection was made with the Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research). Bundists thus hoped to make their own mark on Parisian Yiddish culture. The next three chapters address transpolitical cultural activities: drama (","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"24 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel by Katell Berthelot (review)","authors":"Daniel H. Weiss","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911533","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel by Katell Berthelot Daniel H. Weiss Katell Berthelot. Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 552 pp. Katell Berthelot’s monograph sets out an ambitious goal: to correct for previous scholarly tendencies to downplay the impact of the “pagan” Roman Empire on Jewish history and thought. While various lines of scholarship have highlighted political, legal, and military aspects of the Jewish interaction with the Roman Empire prior to its Christianization, Berthelot emphasizes that there has been insufficient focus on the ideological and theological challenge posed to Jews and Judaism during that period, and that many scholars have associated Jewish ideological-theological responses primarily with Christianity and the Christian Roman Empire (8–9). Against this trend, she presents the reader with an extensive presentation of various juxtapositions between ideological dimensions promulgated by Roman cultural and political institutions and writings, on the one hand, and Jewish texts (primarily Philo, Josephus, and classical rabbinic literature), on the other hand, showing ways in which the latter can be fruitfully understood as responding to and resisting the former. Importantly, she shows the ways in which Jewish texts can be understood as resisting Roman imperial ideology while also imitating or appropriating various aspects of that ideology, as resistance can take [End Page 450] the form both of explicit rejection and of competitive imitation of that which is to be resisted. Each of Berthelot’s chapters provides the reader with an in-depth treatment of a relevant subtopic. Chapter 1 focuses on the ways in which pre-Roman Israelite/Jewish texts engaged with and responded to earlier ancient empires, setting conceptual precedents for writers in the Roman period to draw upon and modify. Chapter 2 focuses on implicitly and explicitly theological and theopolitical dimensions of Roman imperial ideology, highlighting notions such as the Roman people’s “genius”; the personification of Roma as a goddess; Rome’s claim of divine election and providence; military victory as divine blessing stemming from Roman virtue and piety; and Roman claims about its achievement of “peace.” She then shows how, particularly following the destruction of the Temple and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the apparently “defeated” status of Israel was used by the Romans to proclaim the defeat of Israel’s God and/or the divine rejection of Israel, with Rome taking the place of Israel in divine favor. Accordingly, she analyzes various texts to show that they can be understood as seeking to respond to and resist this Roman imperial assumption. Rabbinic literature’s linking of the Roman Empire to Esau/Edom (as Jacob/Israel’s twin), prior to the empire’s Christianization, underscores the competitive dynamic and the distinctive status assign","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson Faure (review)","authors":"Jaclyn Granick","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911542","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France by Laura Hobson Faure Jaclyn Granick Laura Hobson Faure. A “Jewish Marshall Plan”: The American Jewish Presence in Post-Holocaust France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022. xix + 345 pp. Laura Hobson Faure’s monograph, adapted, updated, and translated from her French-language edition, has already made a splash in the Anglophone Jewish world, winning the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. The monograph is indeed a superb example of historical scholarship and writing, which shine in its English edition. A Jewish Marshall Plan focuses on the post-Holocaust Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in France as a way of dually exploring the entangled nature of American and French history and its Jewish counterparts. When the French edition was published in 2013, the JDC as a subject of historical inquiry was still rare. Hobson Faure’s work has been crucial in the last decade in shifting historiography on overseas American Jewish philanthropy from hagiographical institutional history into many emerging transnational history frameworks, including: America in the world, international humanitarianism and Jewish philanthropy, postwar American influence on France, and Jewish Diaspora after the Holocaust. A combination of thorough archival research in addition to original oral histories, deployed with a particular sensitivity to gender dynamics, provides a stunning array of viewpoints grounding the entire narrative. A Jewish Marshall Plan opens via an introduction to French Jewish resistance member turned humanitarian social worker, Gaby Wolff Cohen, whom we meet again throughout the book. Wolff Cohen’s story reminds readers of the American organizations and professions related to social work, teaching, and nursing that were so fundamental to this project and to nurturing women’s emerging communal leadership. Hobson Faure points out, though, soberingly, that despite the similarities in the effort by Americans to influence French society, while the Marshall Plan responded to the Cold War, the American Jewish initiative was rather a response to the Holocaust, undertaken to fill a void where Jewish survivors were a political afterthought. This resulted in a parallel welfare system, both by choice and by need: other humanitarian associations like the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration sought to rebuild nation-states and promote internationalism, while the JDC aimed to re-enroot Jews in the nation-state. Setting the scene, chapter 1 explains that French Jews understood themselves as equal partners to American Jewish organizations, due to their identification with the legacy of the Alliance Israélite Universelle—despite their Holocaust ruination. In 1933, the JDC began to shift its attention from eastern toward western Europe in response to new refugee crises, relocating its European hub back to Paris (where it had begun in","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig (review)","authors":"Ari Joskowicz","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911545","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture by Jason Lustig Ari Joskowicz Jason Lustig. A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 280 pp. The publication of Jason Lustig’s book A Time to Gather makes clear that Jewish studies is finally experiencing its own archival turn. Building on the [End Page 478] momentum generated by other recent works in the field, Lustig’s book marks a new stage in this scholarship, with its sweeping analysis of Jewish efforts to build monumental document collections during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. An intellectual and cultural history of some of the largest Jewish archival repositories in Germany, Israel, and the United States, Lustig’s volume demonstrates how the archives that scholars consult to unearth sources about the ideas and ideologies animating modern Jewish life are themselves an expression of these very same impulses. Lustig’s central contention is that the Jewish archives he studies were engaged in a shared project that also pushed them into competition with one another, as each developed ambitions of total collecting. The first chapter charts the origin story of that modern ambition by covering the establishment of the Gesamtarchiv der deutschen Juden, which the German Federation of Jewish Communities founded in 1903 to bring together the collections of Jewish institutions across the German Empire. Mirroring German nationalist understandings of the unified history of German territory, these collections sought to centralize communal documents produced across the new empire. Focusing on this geographic and territorial ambition, Lustig carefully reconstructs the thinking and ideologies behind the Gesamtarchiv’s and later archives’ efforts to gather in one institution traditional forms of written documentation of Jewish history. These aspirations were front and center in the efforts of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, the subject of the second chapter. Mirroring the larger project of a Zionist ingathering of exiles, the General Archives aimed to reproduce that mission for a wider range of historical records. Archivists and administrators shaped by the German tradition sought to create an even grander version of a total archive that would bring the documentary traces of Jewish life from Jews around the world to Jerusalem. Its later name, the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, underlines this claim. Founded at the dawn of a new age in archival technology, the Central Archives engaged in a massive project of microfilming whenever physical documents proved difficult to acquire. The American Jewish Archives, the focus of chapter 3, represent a concurrent post-Holocaust effort in the United States. Under the visionary leadership of Jacob Rader Marcus, the archive developed a hemispheric vision of collecting in the Americas. It also emphasized the role that decentralized co","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"21 11","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Porous Boundaries of the Zohar in the Age of Print: A Zoharic Homily on the Sinew of the Thigh as a Signifier of Sexual Threat","authors":"Leore Sachs-Shmueli","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911527","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This microtextual analysis of a Zoharic textual unit sheds light on the boundaries and ideologies that guided the editors as they prepared the first print edition of the Zohar (Mantua, 1558), revealing how they adapted and interpolated an external commentary by Joseph of Hamadan, a thirteenth-century Castilian kabbalist. Furthermore, examining the adaptation of this same passage by a fourteenth-century Italian kabbalist, Menaḥem Recanati, provides insights into an important stage in the canonization of the Zohar. This fascinating case study not only contributes to the textual criticism of the Zohar but also brings to the fore the construction of improper sexuality as the most dangerous threat to the male Jew.","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century by Matthias B. Lehmann (review)","authors":"Björn Siegel","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911552","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century by Matthias B. Lehmann Björn Siegel Matthias B. Lehmann. The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2022. 400 pp. In his newest book, Matthias B. Lehmann embarks on the mission of writing a biography of Baron Moritz (Maurice) de Hirsch. Despite the missing personal papers of Baron de Hirsch, Lehmann’s biographical study successfully “opens a window onto the larger world of the Jewish nineteenth century” and “presents a trans-national, pan-European story” (7). It could be written predominately based on Baron de Hirsch’s business papers and family correspondences stored in various archives and libraries across the world. The first part, entitled “European family,” illustrates the rise of the Hirsch family starting with Jacob Hirsch (1764–1840), the grandfather of Baron de Hirsch, who was granted the status of nobility by the Bavarian king in 1818. The history of the Hirsch family unfolds in a time when capitalism began to change the social and political framework of societies and emancipation began [End Page 493] to offer new possibilities for European Jews. Baron de Hirsch was born in 1831 into a circle of Jewish families that had profited from these new political and social circumstances. He even strengthened this elitist and transnational network by his marriage with Clara Bischoffsheim. When on April 17, 1869, Baron de Hirsch signed a preliminary agreement on the Ottoman railroad concession, he finally joined the first ranks of Europe’s bankers and financiers and the “new [Jewish] aristocracy.” Even though the family did not gain dynastic status due to the early death of son Lucien (1887) and the problematic relations with granddaughter Lucienne (daughter of Lucien and Irène Premelic) or the other two adopted children, Baron de Hirsch began to symbolize the “new nucleus of political power within the Jewish world” (39). Jewish solidarity and the advocacy of Jewish rights across the globe remained as important as being a businessman and citizen of a European nation with economic interests and an imperial and “civilizing mission.” By examining major European newspapers and journals, Lehmann illustrates how the European press began to shape the image of Baron de Hirsch, but also fueled antisemitic discourses about him and his philanthropic and political endeavors. The origins of Baron de Hirsch’s wealth are studied in the second chapter of the book, which gives insight into his economic activities in the context of the Ottoman railway construction. Lehmann reveals in this rich and sometimes overwhelmingly detailed chapter how Baron de Hirsch’s economic plans and his participation in the politics of “railroad imperialism” paved the way for a new modernity and profoundly changed ideas of mobility. Moreover, Baron de Hirsch’s successful business practices led to further antisemitic imaginations in European politics","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"21 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss (review)","authors":"Matthew Kraus","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911532","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature by Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss Matthew Kraus Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss. When Near Becomes Far: Old Age in Rabbinic Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. x + 221 pp. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” (Simon and Garfunkel, 1968) Mira Balberg and Haim Weiss have beautifully written a monograph that captures the contradictions, ambiguities, and anxieties of old age through close readings of selected narratives from the rabbinic corpus. The title itself captures the essence of the authors’ subtle and profound treatment of the subject. Playing on a traditional reference to the declining eyesight of the elderly, they center old age as a reading strategy, “to shed light on . . . these rich texts” using “age as a primary lens . . . through which near can become far and far can become near” (11). Rather than focus on the legal and narrative selections that speak directly about old age, the authors examine stories in which old age plays a consequential, but not necessarily central part. In asking why a character is an old man, or why age is mentioned in passing, or why a generation gap is an element in a story, the authors reveal the conflicting cultural assumptions about the elderly and the corresponding friction laid bare when embodied in narrative. The authors do many things well in this book. Especially commendable are their sensitive and theoretically informed readings of texts and their use of parallel versions to highlight the unique relevance of old age in the Babylonian Talmud compared to Palestinian traditions. They also avoid essentializing old age and rabbinic literature. Even though they regularly refer to “rabbinic literature” and “old age,” one never gets the sense that these are totalizing and stable terms. The book is divided into seven sections: an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Since the individual chapters center on analyzing specific texts, the introduction provides the authors’ general impressions resulting from their comprehensive survey of references to old age in rabbinic literature. They explain that the tension between ideal and reality productively frames the analysis of primarily narrative materials. Rabbinic literature contains both idealized representations of old age and “the psychologically, physiologically, and socially complicated realities of aging” (2). Statements and stories can refer to the idyllic notions of respect toward the elderly and irenic intergenerational interactions, as well as physical and mental decline, social marginalization, and resentful children. Here the authors also draw on anthropologist Haim Hazan’s distinction between the “ageless self,” whose wisdom remains intact, and the “selfless age,” where the self has fundamentally become lost along with the person’s physical and mental faculties. The authors consciously concentrate on literary texts and preempt any attempt to historicize old age. Rather, t","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"39 2","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity by Gregg E. Gardner (review)","authors":"Andrew Higginbotham","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911530","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity by Gregg E. Gardner Andrew Higginbotham Gregg E. Gardner. Wealth, Poverty, and Charity in Jewish Antiquity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. xiii + 284 pp. Gregg E. Gardner has previously written on the topic of charity in his Origins of Organized Charity in Rabbinic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In the present work, he takes the next step in this investigation “to help fill the gap in critical research on wealth, poverty, and charity in late antique Judaism” (2). In chapter 1, he reveals that the Tannaim occupied the top two strata of wealth in their society (middle-class artisans and merchants and upper-class landowners). From such a position, they perceived “poverty as a possible impediment to Torah study” (22) and their texts often reflect the perspective of the benefactor (36). In chapter 2, Gardner examines the rabbinic interpretations of the biblical commandment to provide for the poor during the harvest. His investigation reveals that pe’ah, gleanings and forgotten produce, never belong to the householder, as they are portrayed as God’s direct beneficence to the poor. In chapter 3, Gardner contrasts the negative commandments involving the harvest with the positive rabbinic command to give charity from one’s own wealth. Individual direct almsgiving thus forms the center of the present book and the counterpoint to the focus on organized charity in Gardner’s previous work. This line of study begins in chapter 3 with the preliminary observation that “charity [is] given to the living and to the poor” (59). In chapter 4, Gardner turns the lens of his investigation onto the content of that charity, that is, wealth. Mammon is perceived more neutrally by the rabbis than by other groups of the period (Christians, Qumran, etc.), perhaps because, as Gardner argues, “the cultural and social world in which the rabbis lived was increasingly monetized” (97). In chapter 5, Gardner extends this monetization idea with a study of divine favor as “wages” for fulfilling divine commandments. In chapter 6, Gardner explores another aspect of charity, that is, as a mechanism by which to preserve one’s wealth through “investment” in the divine treasure scheme. The Greco-Roman model of benefaction by which elites built buildings or public works out of their wealth (euergetism) is then seen by the rabbis in tension with the material dilemma of squandering versus spending one’s resources. Chapters 5 and 6 then form their own duality, examining the polarities of earned and invested wealth along the spectrum of the divine-human relationship. Chapter 7 explores rabbinic anxiety over the accumulation and loss of wealth. Gardner argues here that the charity system established by the rabbis can also be seen as a safety net against their own apprehension about the ephemerality of one’s net worth. Finally, chapter 8 compares rabbinic views on wealth and charity to early Christian para","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"24 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270 by Mordechai Z. Cohen, and: Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning in Medieval Europe: A New Perspective on an Exegetical Revolution by Mordechai Z. Cohen (review)","authors":"Robert A. Harris","doi":"10.1353/ajs.2023.a911536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ajs.2023.a911536","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270 by Mordechai Z. Cohen, and: Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning in Medieval Europe: A New Perspective on an Exegetical Revolution by Mordechai Z. Cohen Robert A. Harris Mordechai Z. Cohen. The Rule of Peshat: Jewish Constructions of the Plain Sense of Scripture and Their Christian and Muslim Contexts, 900–1270. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 496 pp. [End Page 456] Mordechai Z. Cohen. Rashi, Biblical Interpretation, and Latin Learning in Medieval Europe: A New Perspective on an Exegetical Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 350 pp. With these two publications, Mordechai Cohen has managed to break new ground and, particularly with The Rule of Peshat, has provided most useful studies for anyone interested in the history of medieval biblical exegesis. The “rule” that Cohen addresses in The Rule of Peshat is that “a (Scriptural) verse never escapes from the hands of its plain meaning,” an ancient rabbinic dictum1 but one that the medievals applied in a range of meanings that the book investigates. The words “plain meaning” render the elusive ancient rabbinic term פשוטו, which, like its medieval successor, פשט, was never defined either in antiquity or the medieval period.2 Cohen has written eight chapters in The Rule of Peshat, each devoted to an individual exegete or school, and in each of them he analyzes the degree to which those commentators have incorporated the rule in their exegesis. Following an introduction in which he traces the emergence of peshat from its antecedents in ancient midrash, Cohen includes chapters on Geonim and Karaites; the Andalusian school; Rashi; R. Joseph Kara and Rashbam; the Byzantine tradition; Abraham Ibn Ezra; Maimonides; and Naḥmanides. In The Rule of Peshat, Cohen distinguishes his approach from the older scholarly view that finds a “continuous peshat-derash dichotomy from antiquity to the modern era”; instead, he argues for a dynamic view of peshat that each peshat exegete developed on his own and/or in light of exegetes who preceded him. Briefly, Cohen examines the means through which medieval exegetes transformed an ancient, barely recognized observation into the fundamental rule for much of their biblical exegesis. Cohen points out that for early pashtanim such as Saʿadiah, the rule was firm—but yielded to rabbinic devotion to Oral Torah that was determinant in case of conflict between peshat and Halakhah. However, later exegetes strengthened the rule, which led to peshat being considered of coequal value with midrash, even with respect to biblical verses that nominally addressed matters of Halakhah. Ultimately, Cohen claims that for some exegetes, the rule requires the exegete to recognize peshat as the “exclusive hermeneutical authority,” even with the attendant problems to which this claim might lead.3 This is not the","PeriodicalId":54106,"journal":{"name":"AJS Review-The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies","volume":"23 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135454883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}