The literary and historical study of rabbinic literature increases our understanding of rabbinic texts and enables us to isolate different stages in the history of traditions. Amoraic teachings, in particular, have undergone a complex process of enunciation, interpretation, transmission, adaption, and application prior to their incorporation into their present contexts. They have likewise received literary enrichment and suffered recasting in the course of their integration into wider units and of the overall compilation of gemara. Accordingly, the extant versions may not reflect the most fundamental or original use and import of a tradition. Once aware of these processes we can, moreover, better appreciate the concerns which elicited and shaped the early stages of the teachings as well as the later ones which may have contributed to the transformations.

Students of medieval Near Eastern Jewish history have long recognized the immediate relevance of Islamic legal sources delineating the status of dhimmīs (i.e., all non-Muslim protected peoples) to understanding the position of Jews in Islamic domains.1 Jews are rarely singled out in the sources relating to the legal status of the religious minorities. For instance, the extant versions of the so-called Pact of ‘Umar, the document which spells out the obligations and privileges of the dhimmī communities, specify Christians as the recipients. Hence inferences about the position of the Jews in Islamic law have perforce had to be drawn from records referring to dhimmīs in general, or to Christians in particular. relating to the legal status of the religious minorities. For instance, the extant versions of the so-called Pact of 'Umar, the document which spells out the obligations and privileges of the dhimmī communities, specify Christians as the recipients. Hence inferences about the position of the Jews in Islamic law have perforce had to be drawn from records referring to dhimmīs in general, or to Christians in particular. In a similar vein, attention has properly been paid to the fact that such documents as the important Caliphal charter for a twelfth-century Nestorian Catholicos, head of the principal Christian denomination in the eastern Islamic lands, shed light on the administrative relationship between the Islamic state and the Jewish minority.

With the sure touch of the true historian (a rare gift) Gershom Scholem has opened up for us new avenues toward the understanding of Jewish messianism and, in particular, its most fateful manifestation after the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt: Sabbatianism. There are no pseudomessiahs, he teaches us. For any attempt to translate the idea of messianism into reality is doomed to end in failure, but failure is not its end. This is demonstrated by the movement connected with Sabbatai Sevi, or, if one may associate two such incongruous phenomena, the death of Christ on the cross.

Medieval lexicographers and commentators frequently note unique words in the Bible. The descriptions they use for this purpose are regularly understood to be equivalent to the modern term hapax legomenon. One example of this is Joshua Blau's assertion that in “Hebrew literature hapax legomena are called ’en lo ’ah, 'en lo haver, ’en lo re‘a ba-Miqra'.” Although there is not complete consensus as to the definition of the modern term, overall its meaning is clear and constant: a hapax legomenon is a word which occurs only once within a defined corpus; to identify a word as a hapax legomenon is to make an assertion about its frequency of use.

Haskalah autobiography, as S. Werses has surveyed it, is a wide field which includes such well known figures as I. S. Reggio, S. D. Luzzatto, M. H. Letteris, A. Gottlober, S. Y. Fuenn, J. L. Gordon, M. A.Guenzburg, and M. L. Lilienblum. The fact that these names are well known—and known to us from works other than their autobiographies—is significant. Most of these works are accounts of the author's literary and cultural activity, and they interest us now, if they do at all, as portals to a more complete comprehension of that activity. Reggio, for example, describes his call to Jewish learning and the progress of his career as a scholar; in provoking detail in the pages of Ha-maggid, Luzzatto gives an authorized version of the canon of his works; Letteris and Fuenn offer not so much portraits of themselves as reminiscences of such famous figures from the milieu in which they worked as Rappaport and Krochmal; and Gottlober deflects attention from himself in another way by confining himself to an ethnographic account of the Volhynia and Podolia of his youth.

The audacious goal of Hermann Cohen's philosophy of religion is to reconcile Judaism and modern culture. Interest in Cohen's Jewish writings, especially his posthumous Religion der Vernunft, both on the part of Jewish scholars and the English and Israeli reading public, bears witness to its lasting significance. For the contemporary reader, the value of Cohen's project is, it appears, not canceled even by the historic fact that the Holocaust proved Cohen's messianic dream tragically—even obscenely—out of phase with the grim reality of modern Germany. As Ernst Simon pointed out, Cohen was not the only sage to follow “a false prophet”; Maimonides, for example, found nothing wrong with Rabbi Akiba's fateful allegiance to Bar Kochba.

The vast body of premodern Hebrew literature is usually termed “medieval“—a somewhat misleading term, partly based on the assumption that in most countries the Jewish Middle Ages lasted until the Emancipation in the eighteenth century. However, as is well known, this literature was by no means monolithic. It comprised such disparate schools and styles as portions of the liturgy dating back to late Roman times, the Palestinian and Eastern piyyut (liturgical poetry) of the Byzantine and Moslem periods, the famed Hebrew-Spanish school and its ramifications or parallel schools in Provence, North Africa, Turkey, and the Yemen, other important centers like Germany and France, and an entire millennium of Hebrew poetry in Italy whose later stages coincided with, and were influenced by, the Renaissance and the Baroque. Israel Davidson's monumental bibliography, entitled in English Thesaurus of Hebrew Mediaeval Poetry, actually spans more than a millennium and a half, or, as its Hebrew title states, “from the canonization of the Bible to the beginning of the period of Enlightenment” (in the late eighteenth century). Alternative terms to “medieval” seem scarcely clearer; “postbiblical” tacitly and misleadingly excludes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while “premodern” includes the Bible.

In the year 1620, Abraham b. Naphtali Hirsch Schor, the head of the rabbinical court of Satanov, Poland, wrote to Rabbi Mordecai b. David Katz of the neighboring community of Lvov (Lemberg) about a “great and terrible act of God which I heard and saw with my own eyes here in the holy congregation of Satanov.” R. Abraham related the following story:

…Here in the holy congregation of Gródek (Gorodok) three parasangs away from Satanov, there lives a man named R. Gedaliah with a small four-and-ahalf- year-old son. The youth is a mere boy having no superiority in his studies over the rest of the children of his age. But when his father began to study the Hebrew alphabet and the prayer book with him and saw that the holy spirit rests upon him, he subsequently brought the boy before me to the holy congregation of Satanov to test him. And I tested him several times—a hundred times and more—myself along with my colleagues who were with me and we saw the work of the Lord and his wonders, for He is exceedingly great. I asked him: “Please tell me the beginning of the halakhah learned today.” He immediately related the halakhah, answering: “Rabbi Ashi said that our mishnah states: I can likewise prove,” etc.

If Shmuel ben Yosef ha-Levi ibn Nagrella, better known as Shmuel ha-Nagid (938–1055), has been variously praised by his contemporaries, later medieval litterateurs and moderns as an innovative and forceful writer, his poetry qua poetry has been subjected to little close scrutiny. Three short poems have been analyzed as wholes; individual stichs illustrative of typical figures and rhetorical devices in the Hebrew poetry of Spain have been cited; diverse features of a good many genres, including influences of Arabic models have been noted; and various insightful observations have been made.

In Le muséon 82 (1969): 85–86, and 89 (1976): 311–12 James Drescher, in a series entitled “Graeco-Coptica,” discussed the word (and , showing that in late Greek and in Coptic it bears the additional meaning of “alms, charity.” To his discussion should be added the remarks of Saul Lieberman, in an article entitled “, Charity, Alms,” Journal of Biblical Literature 65 (1946): 69–72. There Lieberman brings considerable evidence for in this special usage in early Christian literature. He also shows there that a similar semantic development took place in the case of the Hebrew word (and its Aramaic equivalents), which came likewise to mean “alms, charity.” (See further his note apud Leviticus Rabba, ed. Mordecai Margulies [Jerusalem, 1958], pt. 4, p. 870 to line 56.)

D. Sperber has confirmed, from rabbinic sources, the argument of J. Drescher (Le muséon 82 [1969]: 98—100) that τράπεζ was used to mean a “paten, tray, dish” in addition to its better known meaning of “table.” We shall here try, through the use of rabbinic sources, to show the real, archaeological background behind the semantic change from “table” to “tray” and to suggest that this background may have been a cause of that change.