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Dov Ber of Bolechov (1723-1805), Jewish wine merchant and polyglot, known for his dispute with the Frankists in Lwów (Lemberg) in 1759, left the Hebrew manuscripts of his two main works: זכרונות ר׳ דוב מבולחוב (The Memoirs of Dov Ber of Bolechov) and iדברי בינה (Understanding Words). In the former work he describes his life story and the story of his family but also the history of Jews in Eastern Galicia, writing also about important events from the history of Poland, and his description as an outside observer seems to be reliable. In the latter work Dov Ber reveals his attitude towards other religions, especially towards Christianity, and the defence of Rabbinic Judaism and its main book Talmud, or more precisely, of the complete reliability of the Oral Torah, is the leitmotif of Diwre binah. Can we speak of religious dialogue in the 18th century? The purpose of the paper is to present Christian-Jewish relations in the Polish lands, in particular in Eastern Galicia in the 18th century from a Jewish perspective in the description of Dov Ber of Bolechov.

Against continuing attempts to define “Old Testament theology” or “biblical theology” in exclusively Christian terms, and in light of ongoing methodological diversity and confusion between proponents of Jewish biblical theology, this article suggests three models for the latter. The first one investigates the theologies of the different parts of the Hebrew Bible on their own, diachronically, without interference from later theology or practice. The second one focuses synchronically on the form of the Hebrew Bible as canonized, and is as objective as this basic biblical text allows. The third one is explicitly subjective and confessional, reading the Hebrew Bible in relation to the larger canon of Judaism, that is, the Oral Torah (= talmudic and midrashic literature). All three models have a legitimate place in the construction of a genuinely Jewish biblical theology, but they must not be confused. They all begin with different presuppositions and pursue different goals, but when properly distinguished, they can also complement one another, each exploring different aspects of the theology of the Jewish Bible.

Rabbinic tradition indicates a revision of the text of the Book of Ezekiel in the first century ce and suggests the rationale behind it. Hanania ben Hezeqiah is said to have “harmonized” Ezekiel with the Torah shortly before the first Jewish revolt, to save the book from suppression by the rabbis. Hasty redaction, followed by immediate standardization, offers the best explanation for the atrocious grammar, orthography, and syntax of the received Hebrew text, along with the plethora of words and expressions common to post-biblical Hebrew. The goal of Hanania’s project was to discourage the conflation of the enthroned figure in Ezek. 1 with the “one like a son of man” in Dan. 7:13 and thus combat the “two Powers heresy.” His project is related to the outburst of speculation on the throne of yhwh and the merkabah in the mid-first century ce

From the earliest stages of Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars of Judaism typically read statements about God in the classical sources of Judaism with a mediaeval philosophical lens. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate the essential unity and continuity between rabbinic Judaism, later mediaeval Jewish philosophy and modern Judaism. In the late 1980s, the Maimonidean hold on rabbinic scholarship began to crack when the ‘revisionist school’ sought to drive a wedge between rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and Maimonidean Judaism, on the other hand, by highlighting the deep continuities and links between rabbinic Judaism and mediaeval Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The revisionist scholars regarded rabbinic Judaism as a pre-cursor to mediaeval Kabbalah rather than mediaeval Jewish philosophy. This article provides the history of scholarship on these two methods of reading rabbinic texts and then proposes that scholars adopt a third method. That is, building on the work of recent scholarship, we should confront theological rabbinic texts on their own terms, without the guiding hand of either mediaeval Jewish framework.

The opening sentence of Pirqei Avot evokes a history of Torah transmission which is also of particular importance in legitimizing the existence and roles of the Oral Torah as an integral section of Torah. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Yiddish translators of the tract frequently expanded the original Hebrew text while following the strategy of Yiddish translations of the Bible known as Khumesh mit khiber, or ‘a Yiddish rendition with additions’: a Yiddish version of the Hebrew text aimed at providing its reading public a coherent text to understand in their Ashkenazi vernacular. As may be expected, the boundaries between translation and commentary were consequently blurred, but the Yiddish version was nevertheless considered as a translation of the original Hebrew text.

This chapter concerns Nahman Krochmal (1785–1840), a key figure in the development of Jewish spirituality in central and eastern Europe. It examines the extent to which Krochmal’s writings were influenced by the gaon of Pumbedita in Babylonia, Sherira (c.906–1006). Krochmal summed up his spiritual life and work in his incomplete study, Moreh nevukhei hazeman (‘guide of the perplexed of the time’). Its central theme is the Oral Torah, one of the pillars of rabbinic Judaism. In Krochmal’s time the Oral Torah was subjected to heavy criticism. But almost 850 years before Krochmal’s Moreh nevukhei hazeman, Sherira wrote a letter as a response to a series of questions concerning the formation of the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmuds, etc., posed to him by Jacob ben Nissim on behalf of the holy community of Kairouan in North Africa.

The Rabbinic literature may be compared with the Christian Scriptures and vice versa, thus providing evidence of the beliefs held by authoritative sages of the two different communities of Judaism. The Rabbinic tradition is relevant to New Testament studies insofar as the two bodies of writings appeal to the same holy Scripture. By analyzing how they respond to that Scripture, we learn the choices people face and we better understand the context in which they made their decisions. Here, by evaluating one aggadic example and one halakhic one, we see how, in their treatment of Scripture, the Rabbinic literature and the New Testament appear to intersect but primarily part company. The result is a deeper comprehension of the distinctive ideologies and values of each tradition.

This essay explores how changing the subject can function as a valid legal process in classical rabbinic literature. In order to do so, it first establishes standard rabbinic legal procedure, in which the legal reasoning for arguments is debated and either supported or refuted. Next, it discusses cases that do not fit this pattern: namely, those in which a rabbi, faced with a contradictory or complex argument, changes the subject rather than his reasoning or ruling. Through a discussion of such cases, this essay argues that, while not preferable, changing the subject can in fact be a valid rabbinic legal process.

Канонические Евангелия содержат серию споров Иисуса Христа с иудеями. Наибольшее количество полемических историй находится в Евангелии от Матфея. Часто аргументация Христа основана на доводах от Писания — приеме, после которого обычно спор заканчивался. В статье рассмотрены иудейские герменевтические приемы, которые в повествовании ап. Матфея приводятся в полемических речах Иисуса Христа. С целью кратко познакомить читателя с иудейской герменевтической традицией, тесно связанной с развитием полемики, немного сказано об истории зарождения, развития и особенностях иудейского толкования. С целью исследовать методы толкования, которые применял Иисус Христос, для сравнения взяты семь правил толкования, сформулированные Гиллелем (сер. I в. до Р. Х. — нач. I в. по Р. Х.). На основании анализа полемических историй в Евангелии от Матфея было обнаружено несколько случаев, когда Христос применяет некоторые герменевтические приемы Гиллеля: каль ва-хомер, обобщение из одного стиха, обобщение из двух стихов, аналогия из другого места. Результаты исследования позволяют говорить о том, что логика рассуждений Христа протекала согласно известным иудейским канонам построения умозаключений, что делало речь понятной для Его современников. Кроме того, были получены новые сведения для дальнейшего изучения новозаветной полемики., The canonical Gospels contain a series of disputes between Jesus Christ and the Jews. The greatest number of polemical stories is in the Gospel of Matthew. Often the argument of Christ is based on the arguments from the Scriptures — an approach, after which the dispute usually ends The article discusses the Jewish hermeneutic techniques that are used in the narration of St. Matthew in the polemical speeches of Jesus Christ. In order to briefly introduce the reader to the Jewish hermeneutic tradition, which is closely related to the development of polemics, the author first discusses the origin, development, and peculiarities of the Jewish interpretation. In order to investigate the methods of interpretation that Jesus Christ applied, the seven rules of interpretation formulated by Hillel were taken for comparison (middle of the first century BC to beginning of the first century AD). Based on an analysis of the polemical stories in the Gospel of Matthew, several cases were discovered where Christ applied some of Hillel’s hermeneutic techniques: kal va-chomer, a generalization from one verse, a generalization from two verses, an analogy from another place in Scripture. The results of the study suggest that the logic of Christ’s reasoning proceeded according to the well-known Jewish canons of drawing conclusions, which made the speech understandable for His contemporaries. In addition, new information was obtained for further study of the New Testament controversy.

The meaning of Torah min HaShamayim has been debated by Jewish theologians across the centuries and these discussions have intensified in the light of modern science and critical historical and biblical studies. The understandings of what is meant by the divinely revealed Torah have historically marked the boundaries of the Jewish community, and in the contemporary world define the limits of Orthodox Jewish identity. The recent statement of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) on Torah is the starting point for an analysis of two novel models of revelation by Louis Jacobs and Emmanuel Levinas. The conclusion focuses on their ongoing relevance to the contemporary debates at the very heart of Orthodox Judaism.

Many Orthodox Jews, especially the Ultra-Orthodox or “Haredim,” insist that both the Written and Oral Torah as we know them were given at Sinai and that any mention of halakhic development is heresy. This article seeks to highlight change in American Orthodox Judaism from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. The first part deals with cultural change. A series of changes in the halakhah-related sphere that are deemed to be religiously acceptable in the halakhah-observant community are then presented. The issue of the influence of values on the halakhic decision-making process is briefly discussed, after which a number of possibilities—sociological and demographic—are raised as explanations of the basis for the then-Chief Rabbi Brodie's veto of the appointment of Rabbi Louis Jacobs as Principal of Jews’ College and his subsequent refusal to reappoint Jacobs as Minister of London's New West End Synagogue.

The OPENING PASSAGE of tractate Avot is undoubtedly one of the most, if not the most, famous rabbinic texts in the entire classical rabbinic corpus. "Moses received Torah from Sinai," claims mAvot 1.1, a Torah that he handed on to Joshua, "and Joshua [handed it on] to the Elders, and the Elders [handed it on] to the prophets and the prophets [handed it on] to the people of the Great Assembly," the last "remnant" of whom was Simeon the Righteous, who handed on that Torah to his "successors." According to the following passages in that famous mishnah, An tigonos of Sokho "received" from Simeon the Righteous, Yosse ben Yoezer and Yosse ben Yohanan "received" from "him,"* 1 Joshua ben Perahiah and Mattai2 the Arbelite "received" from "them," Judah ben Tabbai and Simeon ben Shatah "received" from "them," Shemaiah and Abtalion "received" from "them," and Hillel and Shammai "received" from "them."3 As noted by Martin Jaffee, this unit is "the best-known example of the claim that all rabbinic teaching stems from a Mosaic source."4So pivotal are these lines for our thinking about rabbinic Judaism that when Jacob Neusner, for example, attempted a "Definition of Rabbinic Judaism," his starting point was basically a recapitulation of that passage:The central conception of rabbinic Judaism is the belief that the ancient Scriptures constituted divine revelation, but only a part of it. At Sinai, God had handed down a dual revelation: the written part known to one and all, but also the oral part preserved by the great scriptural heroes, passed on by prophets to various ancestors in the obscure past, finally and most openly handed down to the rabbis who created the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds.5Although Neusner did not furnish any reference to support this view, it is clear from the vocabulary he used that his major source was the famous beginning of tractate Avot in the Mishnah, which he views as encapsulating "the central conception of rabbinic Judaism."David Weiss-Halivni, too, views "the oldest layer" of Avot, the "chain of tradition from Moses to the five disciples of R. Yochanan ben Zakkai," as a text of crucial importance for the emerging rabbinic tradition that shifted its main course of study from "midrash" to "mishnah."6 According to Halivni, the text was "composed by these five disciples (or by their disciples) around the first quarter of the second century for the purpose of strengthening their authority, showing themselves to be direct successors of Moses, who received the Torah from Sinai."7 Or, as Jaffee puts it, this "chain of tradition" is an "effective apologia defending the continuity of rabbinic teachings with the teaching of Israel's greatest prophet."8These and similar statements all place much weight on tractate Avot as the manifesto of rabbinic Judaism. In this essay I seek to challenge this widespread view. My point of departure is mAvot 2.8f£, which I propose reading as a locus of political polemic among Palestinian rabbis over the question of relationship to Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai and hence to halakhic authority.9 This suggestion will lead me to argue that tractate Avot stems from one circle of rabbinic Judaism, and it reflects the ideology of that group, an ideology that was, in fact, rejected by "mainstream" rabbinic circles-the rabbinic circles that produced the Mishnah.10THE VOICE OF THE MARGINALIZEDMishnah Avot 2.8 is the last passage in the chain of tradition with which tractate Avot begins (mAvot 1.1-15). It uses the same terminology of that chain, claiming that Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai (RYBZ) "received" (bip) from Hillel sind Shammai, who are the last pair mentioned in chapter 1 .n At the same time it presents a novel development and a point of transition in the rabbinic world, in that RYBZ is said to have had students, unlike any of his predecessors. After claiming that RYBZ "received" from Hillel and Shammai, and quoting his own aphorism, the mishnah records RYBZ's praise for each of his students and adds a concluding comment of evaluation:[A] Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai received from Hillel and Shammai. …

How can we account for the popularity of Rashi’s commentary on Torah? Scholars have suggested that Rashi’s personality and his public and literary activities, on the one hand, and the special style of his commentary, on the other, account for the popularity of the commentary. The author proposes that in addition to these factors, it was a unique methodology that caused Rashi’s Torah commentary to become so universally loved: Rashi explained the Torah, above all, by means of aggadot meyashevot, i.e., aggadot that fill gaps in the text but preserve the sequence and meaning of the narrative plot. As far as can be determined, there is no other exegete who invented similar criteria for selecting rabbinic aggadot. The aggada meyashevet has a unique effect upon the Torah, which can be called “thickening:” the reader enjoys the benefit of following the narrative plot, as well as interwoven and integrated subplots. Rashi’s Torah commentary creates an expanded Torah which is loved by its readers far more than the Torah itself, without the aggadot that thicken it.

Jewish reception of scripture from Late Antiquity through recent centuries was largely defined by the rabbis of the first to sixth centuries, whose surviving literature is rich with scriptural readings. In certain matters, these readings were united by common assumptions or habits. For example, from the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) onward, the rabbis, who assumed scripture to be divinely inspired, were nevertheless willing to read against the simple meaning of scripture and to give their own agenda priority. Rabbinic readings also, universally, focused on the fine details of scripture’s formulation and almost never on units larger than a few words. At the same time, rabbinic documents reveal significant development in the rabbinic relationship to scripture, and it is fair to say that the rabbinic appropriation of scripture at the latest stage of the growth of classical rabbinic Judaism, in the Bavli, was assertive, even aggressive, and sometimes radical. In this piece, the author offers a survey of rabbinic scriptural readings from the earliest to the latest of the classical rabbinic documents, identifying some of the most significant developments in each sequential corpus.

This chapter brings into sharp focus the privileged status of action. After an exploration of two “moments” of language—speaking and writing—Wiener Dow connects these two stylizations of language to the Written Torah (The Hebrew Bible) and the Oral Torah (rabbinic literature). The rabbis, he argues, crafted a unified Torah that included both aspects of language, viewing the principal charge of Torah as allowing the eternal, commanding words of the Divine to achieve instantiation in the finite world. The infinite interpretive possibility of the words of Torah yields to an uncompromising insistence that their meaning be realized and expressed through discrete action. Halakha, so conceived, is a response to the Divine in deed. As such, it is interpersonal, creating a shared language of deed and establishing community.

"What's the Talmud? Is it your Gospel?""The Talmud is like a soup, with all things a man can eat in it. But there's wheat and chaff, fruit and pits, and meat and bones. It isn't very good, but it's nourishing. It's full of mistakes and contradictions, but for that very reason it teaches you how to use your mind."Primo Levi1Barry Scott Wimpfheimer. Narrating the Law: A Poetice of Talmudoe Legal Stories. Divinations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pp. 239.Talya Fishman. Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah a? Written Tradition in Medieval JewLfh Culture*». Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.We READ BOOKS from beginning to end. Not so the Bavli. My own rather typical experience with the Babylonian Talmud began, as an elementary school student, with the first tractate, Berakhot, but with the fourth chapter, not the first. From there I ventured into isolated chapters from the fourth order, thence to parts of the second and third orders, and much later, to the forbidding tractates of the final two orders. But change is afoot. I write these words a few days after the internationally heralded end of a cycle oi daf y orni, the practice of studying one folio page (daf, or in Yiddish, blatt) of the Talmud each day (yam) . Daf y orni, insofar as it progresses through the Bavli from cover to cover, reframes the Bavli as a book. The deep if implicit textualism of dafyomi manifests itself, indeed, in the very demarcation of the page as the basic unit of study. The meaning-bearing unit of the Bavli is not the page but the ?ugya, which inevitably stops short of the bottom of the page, or continues on to the next. Daf y orni thus represents the elevation of the page, a printer's innovation, over the ?ugya. Daf y orni innovates in a third, related way by flattening the Bavli's content. Readers of the Bavli have traditionally privileged its legal dialectics over its nonlegal material, or halakhah over aggadah. In the terms supplied by Primo Levi's metaphor of the talmudic soup (a deflationary echo of the sublime "sea of Talmud"), the halakhic meat must be picked off the aggadic bones. The preeminence of halakhah is nowhere so staunchly presumed than in the very rightward-leaning circles that have fueled daf y omi, even though this practice by its nature effaces distinctions between parts of the Bavli.The continuing and arguably unprecedented prominence of the Bavli in contemporary Judaism compels us to reflect critically, and with historical awareness, on this most canonical of Jewish texts. Is there a better or worse way to read the Bavli? How did such a curious text come about, and how did it achieve the authority that it enjoys? Are the innovations in reading practice effected by daf yorni changes in degree or kind, and what might they portend for the future of the Bavli, and of those who look to it for guidance? Two important new books by Barry Wimpfheimer and Talya Fishman offer some answers to these questions and shed light especially on the issues of textualism and the law/narrative divide that I have highlighted above.Wimpfheimer's book offers a poetics of the Bavli's "legal stories," in which he finds a density of meaning that complicates dichotomies and ultimately reveals the law's true character. Law is not (only) code, but cultural discourse, a semiotic matrix that converses and competes with other matrices, like psychology and sociology. Wimpfheimer frames his book as a "deconstructive act" (p. 4) that challenges the dominant Jewish tendency to identify law, as halakhah, with practice, and to set it off against aggadah, imagined as the exclusive locus of meaning. The book thus speaks not only to scholars of rabbinic literature but also, and more urgently, and even sometimes explicitly, to contemporary Jews, who are invited to consider, in its light, "ways in which contemporary halakhic thinkers could reimagine the relationship between Halakhah and evolving contemporary mores" (p. …

This article argues that the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions 1.27–72, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and the Didascalia Apostolorum – third and fourth century-texts, which combine adherence to Jesus with Jewish law observance – would have made sense to Jews in antiquity as Jewish, although non-rabbinic visions of the history and calling of the people of Israel, and that they ought to be considered as part of the history of Judaism. Recent years have witnessed an emerging trend to reread texts previously regarded as ‘Jewish-Christian’ or ‘heretical Christian’ as Jewish texts, and as evidence of diversity within Judaism in the post-70 period. This understanding emerges from the related insights that rabbinic Judaism was not the only, or even the dominant form of Judaism during the early centuries ce, that there was no definitive early split between a well defined Christianity and an equally well defined Judaism, and that Jewish self-identity in antiquity seems to have allowed for adherence to Jesus as an option within Judaism. Abandoning the practice of using rabbinic Judaism as the sole criterion for defining Jewishness in this time period allows us to see the theologies developed by such Jesus-oriented groups with a Jewish self-identity as profoundly Jewish, although non-rabbinic, visions of the history and calling of biblical Israel.

It seems that Matthew intentionally emphasises the importance of the Torah for his community. He highlights Jesus’ high regard for the continuing validity of the Torah. However, he demonstrates that Jesus interpreted the Torah differently from Judaist groups of those times. The intention of this article is to demonstrate this significant role of the Torah in the first Gospel. It is argued that the Torah holds a central position in Matthew and that the Torah continues to remain valid, but that Jesus teaches and enacts an alternative interpretation of the Torah.Keywords: Torah, Law, Matthew, Sermon on the Mount