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This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the academic career of Michael Fishbane. Since his first teaching post at Brandeis University in 1969, Fishbane has been shaping the understanding of Jewish texts and traditions at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The chapter then considers his scholarly contributions. Fishbane wrote and edited more than nineteen books and hundreds of articles and reviews in scholarly journals and encyclopedias. His most influential works includes Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (1985), Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (1989), The Kiss of God: Spiritual Death and Dying in Judaism. An overview of the subsequent chapters in this book is presented.

The debate about the extent to which Bloch was a “Jewish” or a “universalistic” composer intensified as a response to Bloch's Sacred Service. Paradoxically, it was the Sacred Service, the only composition Bloch wrote to a Jewish liturgical text, that represented most intensely the composer's aspirations to universality. However, considered by both Jews and non-Jews as deeply flawed for what was seen as a diluted racial expression, the Sacred Service demonstrated that, however scientifically untenable, race remained a strong enough cultural factor to hinder Bloch's universal claims.

This chapter examines the transmission of astronomical and astrological learning between Babylonians, Greeks, and Jews. More specifically, it considers influences and cultural encounters between Babylonia and Jewish Palestine. It first compares the Babylonian and Jewish texts for similarities and differences in order to identify which Babylonian elements were familiar to Jewish scholars and how they appropriated, used and reworked these. It then explores some of the social and cultural aspects that may have determined the context of transmission of Babylonian elements of astral sciences in Jewish texts and goes on to discuss Jewish texts that attest to knowledge of some elements from Babylonian astronomy, including the Astronomical Book of Enoch. It also highlights evidence suggesting that Babylonian sciences such as astronomy and astrology were transmitted beyond the Mesopotamian cultural realm to the west.

This chapter is based on the responsa of Rabbi Judah ben Asher, a member of one of the leading rabbinic families in early fourteenth-century Castile. His responsa often diverges dramatically and explicitly from the principles of classical Jewish legal texts in addressing what the writer saw as the needs of his time. The chapter looks particularly at extra-halakhic aspects of his decision-making — the extent to which his adjudication is explicitly motivated, influenced, or guided by factors other than the interpretation of the classical sources of halakhah — and what this can say about Jewish life in fourteenth-century Castile. The question of takanot, communal legislation inconsistent with the traditional law, is relevant here. So are decisions manifestly said to be not in accordance with Torah law, whether because of urgent immediate needs or because changing historical circumstances seemed to make the talmudic principle no longer applicable.

This chapter analyses three brief, powerful passages, from different environments and different literary genres. These reveal an enduring ambivalence towards Jewish life in ‘exile’, a reluctance to concede that the centuries of Jewish life in foreign lands were devoid of any positive qualities, and even — rather surprisingly — the suggestion that life in exile might have religious advantages for Jews that were not available in the Holy Land. In short, the actual treatment of exile in Jewish literary texts reveals more nuanced and multivalent aspects. The familiar geography of the traditional concept — exile as forced removal from the Land of Israel and the end of exile as return to that land — is occasionally subverted in unexpected ways. Perhaps even more surprising is a revalorization of the concept, in which living in the ancestral homeland is no longer automatically identified as good, and living outside the land as bad. This chapter attempts to illustrate some of the permutations of this central concept through a literary and conceptual analysis of the three pre-modern passages from Jewish literature.

This chapter introduces the various ways religions draw upon ancient texts and traditions to make sense of contemporary challenges. It illustrates that from the tradition and perspectives of Judaism, there is a strong presumption in favor of medicine and the moral legitimacy of altering the natural world for a good purpose, and thus in favor of germline modification. The Jewish discussion of all medical issues is presented, and five Jewish texts that can be used in modifying human genetic structure are then analyzed. The chapter shows that the strong Jewish commitment to medicine argues that genetic manipulation should be engaged to cure or prevent diseases.

This chapter addresses the question of what holiness is. This question has very rarely been asked of Jewish texts, perhaps because the notion of holiness is so pervasive in Judaism that asking Jewish texts about the nature of holiness is like asking fish about the nature of water. Maimonides held a different view of holiness. Holiness is the name given to a certain class of people, objects, times, and places which the Torah marks off. According to this view, holiness is a status, not a quality of existence. This sort of holiness does not reflect objective reality; it helps constitute social reality. Holy places, persons, times, and objects are indubitably holy, and must be treated with all due respect, but they are, in and of themselves, like all other places, persons, times, and objects. What is different about them is the way in which the Torah commands that they be treated. Their sanctity derives from the uses to which they are put; in that sense, it is teleological.

This chapter recounts the history of Protestant interest in Jews in the modern era, particularly the precedents and inspirations that have offered a model for evangelical interaction with the Jews. Protestant reformers re-evaluated the Christian position toward the Jews, at times following traditional Christian perceptions, and at other times questioning them, renewing their views on Judaism and its position in relation to Christianity. They took a renewed interest in the Jews and in the Hebrew Bible. Some of them, including Martin Luther himself, participated in the Hebraist tradition of the Renaissance and at times developed an appreciation of postbiblical Jewish texts. It was within the ranks of Protestantism, both in the radical left wing of the Reformation and among the mainline thinkers, that a new appreciation developed toward the Jews.

This chapter aims to show that, although all three main kabbalistic models, the ecstatic, the theosophical-theurgical, and the magical, were well represented in kabbalistic literatures available in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, the spectrum of Jewish texts dealing with mystical topics was much more variegated. In addition to these literatures, there were extensive writings concerned with two other forms of spirituality. Their impact may have been less profound than that exercised by kabbalistic literature, but nevertheless they should not be ignored. The earliest form of Jewish mystical literature, the so-called Heikhalot literature stemming from late antiquity, had been preserved mostly by the Ashkenazi Pietists. Another form of medieval Jewish mysticism, which was relatively widespread in Laurentian Florence, was that of Hasidei Ashkenaz.

This paper examines the question of Virgil’s Jewish sources, whether present or absent. It does not pretend to offer a new or decisive answer, whether for Buc. 4 or for Aen. 6, but is hoped to have made some progress in understanding the cultural context in which the question(s) of influence should be studied. The Greco-Jewish texts at the centre of this paper were certainly a rarity, an oddity at Rome, but the textual evidence that there had been cultural contact between the Jewish and Roman literary traditions is very strong, and the existence of a cultural context in Rome which could account for fruitful contacts proves unexpectedly easy to sketch. If the balance of probability in the old debate over Virgil and the Jews should be thought to have shifted slightly, that would be a real step forward.

This introductory article discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the devoted resistance of supporting characters in canonical stories. This volume presents a rereading of several iconic Jewish texts and one Greek tragedy with significant similarities to a Jewish work. These works were chosen for this study because some of the more nuanced cultural messages they carry within them have been missed by other readers. This volume also suggests that many of the cultural values embedded within these stories are animated, highlighted, sharpened, and nuanced through narratives concerning personal relationships between characters in positions of cultural dominance and less powerful or supporting characters.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the devoted resistance of some supporting characters in canonical stories in Jewish texts and Greek tragedy. It argues that the use of the interpretive lens of devoted resistance allows the critical relational voice of supporting characters to be detected in central canonical stories and characters of Jewish tradition. It highlights the recurring motif of supporting characters critiquing culture heroes and even stripping them of their authority, their status, and their names. This chapter concludes that devoted resistance complicates the legacies of all the canonical supporting characters examined in this study and holds the potential to complicate others.