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The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic Judaism—all of rabbinic law, from ancient to modern times, is based on the Talmud, and the Talmud, in turn, is based on the Mishnah. But the Mishnah is also an elusive document; its sources and setting are obscure, as are its genre and purpose.In January 2021 the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law of the Harvard Law School co-sponsored a conference devoted to the simple yet complicated question: “What is the Mishnah?” Leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Israel assessed the state of the art in Mishnah studies; and the papers delivered at that conference form the basis of this collection. Learned yet accessible, What Is the Mishnah? gives readers a clear sense of current and future direction of Mishnah studies.

The Mishnah is the foundational document of rabbinic law and, one could say, of rabbinic Judaism itself. It is overwhelmingly technical and focused on matters of practice, custom, and law. The Oxford Annotated Mishnah is the first annotated translation of this work, making the text accessible to all. With explanations of all technical terms and expressions, The Oxford Annotated Mishnah brings together an expert group of translators and annotators to assemble a version of the Mishnah that requires no specialist knowledge.

In modern times, various Jewish groups have argued whether Jewishness is a function of ethnicity, of nationality, of religion, or of all three. These fundamental conceptions were already in place in antiquity. The peculiar combination of ethnicity, nationality, and religion that would characterize Jewishness through the centuries first took shape in the second century B.C.E. This brilliantly argued, accessible book unravels one of the most complex issues of late antiquity by showing how these elements were understood and applied in the construction of Jewish identity—by Jews, by gentiles, and by the state.Beginning with the intriguing case of Herod the Great's Jewishness, Cohen moves on to discuss what made or did not make Jewish identity during the period, the question of conversion, the prohibition of intermarriage, matrilineal descent, and the place of the convert in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. His superb study is unique in that it draws on a wide range of sources: Jewish literature written in Greek, classical sources, and rabbinic texts, both ancient and medieval. It also features a detailed discussion of many of the central rabbinic texts dealing with conversion to Judaism.