One of the most significant phenomena in the course of modern Jewish history is undoubtedly the astonishing success of the hasidic movement in winning and retaining large numbers of followers. What is even more remarkable is that this process took a relatively short time to come to fruition: It is widely agreed that at the death of the Ba‘al Shem Tov (who is often still regarded as the founder of the movement) in 1760, his circle numbered no more than a few dozen initiates, but by the 1820s, the movement had become dominant in the Jewish society of large swathes of eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Galicia.1 Many different explanations for this success have been proposed: Hasidism's attraction has been variously perceived as a result of its being a movement of religious revival and reform, a movement of social protest and class struggle, a movement popularizing elite Jewish mystical thought, and a movement of social reconstruction.2 In terms of social structure, all scholars agree that Hasidism's main innovation—and a major factor in its success—was the creation of the figure of the zaddik: a charismatic spiritual leader who acts as an intermediary between the individual hasid and God and provides answers to all problems, whether they are spiritual or earthly.3 However, relatively little attention has been paid to the social organization of the early hasidic movement as a whole, which allowed Jews from all over eastern Europe to find their place and nurture their new identity as hasidim.4 My goal here is to examine the development of Hasidism as a social movement from the perspective of the structures that it created to solidify the bond between the zaddik and the hasid. In particular, I shall focus on the ways in which the new movement overcame the geographic barriers separating Jews in different parts of eastern Europe.

One of the most unusual episodes in the annals of Hebrew printing involved the first Jewish printers in Poland—Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz—who began to print in Cracow or, more likely, in neighboring Kazimierz, in 1534.1 Within a year of opening their business, the brothers had produced five relatively short titles, all of which were first editions and four of which were the first Yiddish books ever printed. After about a year of work, the Helicz brothers gave up publishing only to return to the trade about three years later, when they published several classic—and more substantial—rabbinic works in quick succession. However, it was not Samuel, Asher, and Elyakim Helicz who returned to the Hebrew publishing business in Cracow in 1538 but rather Paul, Andreas, and Johannes Helicz, neochristiani.2

Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have tried to explain Karaism in light of comparative scripturalist trends in the history of religion. These trends manifest a common desire to reinstate the revelational text (i.e., the Hebrew Bible, the Qur'an) as the sole basis for religious law and practice. They deny or considerably delimit, on the other hand, the role of “received tradition” (i.e., Jewish torah she-be‘al peh, Islamic Sunnah) as an independent or complementary source of religious authority and legislation. Consequently, the Karaites’ rejection of Jewish oral law as codified in the Mishnah and Talmud and their attempt to reinstate the Hebrew Bible (in its entirety) as the binding source for Jewish law and religious practice, have often been described as the Jewish variation on the theme of sola scriptura.1

I met Simcha Jacobovici in 1998 while doing my dissertation research in Uzbekistan. Long-haired, fair-skinned, and dressed in American garb, he was clearly an outsider like myself, and we introduced ourselves. I told him I was a cultural anthropologist doing fieldwork among the Bukharan Jews. He told me that he was a filmmaker collecting footage for a documentary about the ten lost tribes. I had heard the theory that the Bukharan Jews were among the lost Israelite tribes, but I considered it far-fetched and had trouble taking Simcha's enthusiasm about the possibility seriously.

The Cinquecento was marked by the emergence of expanded and more formalized structures of self-government in Italy's Jewish communities. It is from this century that we begin to have written capitoli (constitutional agreements) and pinkasim (record books).2 By the middle of the century, as Robert Bonfil has demonstrated, the office of community-appointed rabbi had been created and regularized.3 Intense internecine struggles broke out for control over the new institutions, and contemporary rabbinic responsa attest to the slow and sometimes tortuous manner in which early modern Jews felt their way toward new working arrangements, procedures, and understandings.4

Natan Zach, a prominent subversive Israeli poet, began publishing his poetry in the mid-1950s, together with a group of young poets who felt obliged to transform Hebrew poetry. This group included poets and critics such as Moshe Dor, Arye Sivan, Yehuda Amichai, David Avidan, Gershon Shaked, and Benjamin Harshav (Hrushovski). They published their first poems and essays in Likra't (Toward), a journal that they founded, and their group took on the same name. Only four issues of the journal appeared between 1952 and 1954. Zach was one of the outstanding poets in this group. His first book of poetry, Shirim ri'shonim (Early Poems), was published in 1955. His second book, Shirim shonim (Diverse Poems, 1960), totally changed the Israeli canon in terms of its themes and its poetic texture.

A. B. Yehoshua's growing eminence as one of Israel's foremost literary artists has been attended by his emergence as one of the more powerful voices of the secular Zionist left. A highly self-aware writer, Yehoshua has been scrupulously deliberate in separating the intellectual pragmatism of his political writing from the imaginative structures and aesthetic integrity of his literary works. But the generic distinction between polemical essay and imaginative fiction does not preclude overlapping areas of concern as well as a common basis of values and beliefs. Consequently, Yehoshua's essays often prove to be useful means of enhancing the understanding of his fictional works.

In August 1956, Nikita Khrushchev took part in a meeting with a delegation of Canadian communists. Discussing the wave of repression against Jewish intellectuals during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Soviet leader mentioned that he had supported Stalin's decision not to give the Crimea to Jews because it would have created a springboard for attacks on the Soviet Union. Apart from being paranoid about the Soviet Jews' loyalty to the young state of Israel and its imperialist backers, Khrushchev had, as his remark revealed, another paranoia that was characteristic of the Kremlin decision-makers: distrust of the peripheries. Khrushchev and his advisors knew that their totalitarian regime was not such a monolith as it might appear in the eyes of foreign observers, especially because visitors were seldom allowed to travel to the outskirts of the Soviet empire and did not know that some areas had features of fiefdoms. The post-Soviet disintegration of the communist empire confirmed the Kremlin denizens' misgivings.

In this new book, the author of Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe broadens the scope of his earlier acclaimed work. Moving beyond early childhood and schooling, Marcus devotes chapters to the other major stages of the Jewish life cycle (bar mitzvah, marriage, and death). While seeking to present “a comprehensive guide to Jewish rites of passage,” the book also aims to sustain a general thesis: that ritual inventiveness is a persistent pattern of traditional Jewish culture.

In Gender and Jewish Difference, Lisa Lampert proposes that we consider a “hermeneutical woman” alongside the well-documented “hermeneutical Jew” that underpins literary constructions of Christian theology in patristic, medieval, and Renaissance texts (10). The “hermeneutical Jew,” a term coined by Jeremy Cohen, is the originary Christian—the Jew who brought the Christian to “the book” and all its exegetical possibilities but who is incapable of seeing the spirit beyond the letter of the law. The hermeneutical woman is, according to Lampert, the hermeneutical Jew's mate, so to speak; she is another major locus of symbolic projections of the Christian self onto the “other.” Both the hermeneutical Jew and the hermeneutical woman are, as Lampert puts it, “hermeneutically handicapped” (43); they read—the Jew because of his literal-mindedness, the woman because of her feeble-mindedness—with spiritual impediments. They are also, within medieval Christian fiction and drama, profoundly “embodied,” threatening the very foundations of Christian faith—conversion, incarnation, and transubstantiation. According to Lampert, these three tenets of faith, which exist on the border of the body and the spirit, represent ambiguous moments in Christian theology, and they are best captured by “the woman” and “the Jew,” who serve as figures of the spirit subsumed by the body, of transcendence gone awry.

Michael Stanislawski's description of Flavius Josephus's autobiography captures the principal thesis of this elegant reflection on the use of autobiography as a historical source: “I see the Vita not as an ‘autobiography of a very special kind’ but precisely the opposite: as an exemplar of a genre (or series of connected genres) in which an author's life-story is crafted by a highly partial, both conscious and unconscious, selection of which episodes of his or her life to retell, refracted through an ever-changing sense of selfhood” (23). Not one of the seven samples ranks highly in terms of historical accuracy or absence of bias. But as the subtitle conveys, the real value of these autobiographies lies in their ability to reflect the self-fashioning of a literary identity, the tensions of the times (in Josephus's case, the loyal Jew and the virtuous Roman), and the individual's quest for definition in relation to the larger society.

Ronald Hendel's Remembering Abraham is a synthetic work that draws on diverse methodological approaches to tease out the interplay of past and present in the Bible's depiction of history. The plasticity of collective memory—the idea that a community's memory of the past changes as that community changes—is a key idea for this book, part of which is a study of the Bible's portrait of Abraham as a reflection of Israel's evolving identity. Hendel is no minimalist, however. For him, biblical history is not simply an invented memory without connection to what really happened, but a pastiche of memory and myth—a reflection of genuine historical experience framed within fictionalized representation. Remembering Abraham is something of a pastiche itself—several of its chapters reproduce previously published work—but the juxtaposition of these studies has value in its own right, offering students and general readers an accessible introduction to how a clear-headed and well-informed scholar distinguishes history from myth in the Bible—and why, in the end, the Bible resists such a distinction.

This volume takes a very different approach to biblical narrative, law, and society. In many ways, it is a treatise on comparative mythology, on comparative legal practice and attitudes. The author, Daniel Friedmann, is very forthcoming, saying that he does not intend “to tackle the immensity of scholarly literature in the field.” Instead, his intent is to “infer from the biblical stories the legal and moral concepts they reflect and the system of laws underlying them, which seems not to conform with many of the laws of the Pentateuch” (vii). There are only a few references to modern scholarship (all in footnotes—no bibliography of works cited); most of Friedmann's discussion is bolstered by references to Rashi, Maimonides, the Talmud, and other rabbinical commentaries. There is no attempt to interact with modern critical approaches to biblical interpretation, and there is no regard for current discussions of “maximalist” or “minimalist” dating and editing of the text.

Although it is a truism that there are fundamental methodological differences between the Ishmaelean and Aqiban schools of halakhic midrash, scholars have struggled to find a larger framework that explains the reasons for these divergences. Azzan Yadin has rendered an important service by proposing an overarching theory of hermeneutics that encompasses and informs the Ishmaelean approach to legal midrash. What follows is a brief summary and assessment of Yadin's line of argument.

In this elegantly produced volume, Mark Meyerson traces the life of a single Jewish community in Spain, Morvedre (he uses the Catalan name for the Valencian town generally known to medievalists as Murviedro and to modern Spaniards as Sagunto), from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391 through the Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Behind this exercise in local history, however, lies a broader intention: to revise the master narrative of Hispano-Jewish historiography according to which Jewish life in Spain after 1391 was a tale of almost unmitigated woe. By demonstrating that the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply “a gloom-filled parenthesis” for Morvedre's Jews but instead “an era of remarkable resurgence” (3)—nay, “a Jewish Renaissance,” as the book's title provocatively proclaims—Meyerson challenges the regnant vision of Spain's Jewish communities as sliding almost inexorably toward expulsion after 1391. In making his case, he weds an awareness of the historical aerial view with a fluency in older and more recent historiographic trends and an extraordinary mastery of events on the ground. The result is a copiously documented, lucidly written exploration of a treasure trove of hitherto mostly unknown archival sources that dazzles with its wealth of detail and enlivens through regular recourse to vivid vignettes.

The biography of a well-chosen rabbinic figure tells much more than simply the life of an individual; it opens up diverse facets of Jewish life in a given time and place. It also sheds light on the histories of a number of communities because, alas, it was (and is) the lot of many a communal rabbi—even those of the first rank—to be kicked around from place to place.

The intense response to Götz Aly's recently published book, Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus, attests to the continued interest in studies related to Germany's “Jewish Question” and the forces that motivated German citizens to support National Socialism. The scholarship produced decades ago by Paul Massing, Peter Pulzer, Fritz Stern, and George Mosse and reenergized by Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen in the 1990s has produced a rich and detailed analysis of the role that Jews occupied within the German national community. Not surprisingly, the origins and manifestations of anti-Semitism occupy center stage within this body of work, and less antagonistic relations between Jews and Gentiles in Germany receive scant attention. Studies that depict Gentile supporters of Jews and Judaism are virtually nonexistent. Alan Levenson's monograph, Between Philosemitism and Antisemitism, compels us to reconsider the continuum of attitudes toward Jews that existed in Germany from the establishment of the Kaiserreich to the advent of Nazism. The book's eight essays, all of which have been previously published, probe the limits of philosemitism within an anti-Semitic environment and flesh out the opposite end of the societal spectrum from those occupied by German anti-Semitism (xi).

A growing literature on the emergence of a Hebrew national culture in the Jewish Yishuv of Palestine has opened up new understandings of the construction of Jewish nationhood in the modern world and its place in the broader context of modern nationalism. Yaacov Shavit and Shoshana Sitton conceive their study of the Yishuv's festive culture primarily as a contribution to this literature, in which they point to two principal lacunae. First, they argue that much of the scholarship to date has overlooked or oversimplified what were in fact “complex links between the ceremonial tradition and the [new national] festivals” (xii). Indeed, the revolutionary self-image that was central to so much of Zionist thought has often excessively colored the historiographical picture, and scholars have at times too hastily accepted the notion that Zionist culture in Palestine was an unambiguously radical new departure, fundamentally at variance with traditional Jewish ways of life. In fact, revolutionary though it was, Zionist culture in Palestine grew out of an often intense (if ambivalent) dialogue with the Jewish past. Not infrequently, it is the very attempts by (some) Zionist cultural activists to shake free of that tradition's impact that most clearly reveal its lingering shadow.

Over the past decade, we have seen a substantial number of books written on the entirely unlikely reemergence of Jewish life in both German states and the relationship of the Jewish communities to their German environment. Among the major contributions are those by Michael Brenner, Erica Burgauer (not Burgbauer, as in this book), Ulrike Offenberg, Micha Brumlik, Jael Geis, Jeffrey Herf, Juliane Wetzel and Angelika Königseder, Frank Stern, this reviewer, as well as a handful of others. Jay Geller's study, therefore, could not explore new terrain, but it does present us with a wide overview of the early period and a material-rich, diligently researched presentation of the postwar period. As such, it is clearly a new basic reference work for this early period of German–Jewish life.

Tamar El-Or has given us a book that could benefit from the layout of the Talmudic pages that provide the text for the women's studies she has researched. Using her observations as base, she develops multiple perspectives that go well beyond the usual anthropological ethnography, adding layer upon layer of interpretation and perspective. The book begins with a survey and description of the institutes of religious higher learning for women in Israel at the time of her data collection (late 1990s); continues with the presentation and analysis of her interviews with 40 (out of 1,300) female students at Bar-Ilan University's Midrasha (women's institute of religious higher learning) about their development as religious “learners”; presents the results of her three years of participant observation in classrooms at the Midrasha; and concludes with an interpretation of the data from the perspective of “literacy,” which is seen in the anthropological literature as a central facet of societal participation, and its implied meanings for gender relations among Jews (at least among the Orthodox).