Monographs of the Hebrew Union College – Serie

Solomon Bennett Freehof (1892-1990) was one of America's most distinguished, influential, and beloved rabbis. This book analyses Freehof's views on a number of crucial issues that illustrate the evolution of American Reform Judaism.

In 1937, the young Yiddish poet Berl Feldman bade farewell to his family in Radzivil and emigrated to the land of Israel, where he became the Hebrew poet Amir Gilboa. In this study, Warren Bargad describes and interprets Gilboa's works at the various stages of his career and defines his place in the tradition of modern Hebrew poetry.

Exile in Amsterdam is based on a rich, extensive, and previously untapped source for one of the most important and fascinating Jewish communities in early modern Europe: the sermons of Saul Levi Morteira (ca. 1596-1660). It offers those interested in European Jewish history access to primary source documents.

An important study of the politics of Polish Jewry on the eve of its destruction. Drawing from sources in the Polish Jewish and non-Jewish press and from archives in Europe, Israel, and the United States, it examines the efforts of Jews in this major center of Jewish life to secure its existence and advance its interests in the late 1930s.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson shows that rabbinic Judaism regarded itself primarily as a prescription for the attainment of happiness, and that the discourse on happiness captures the evolution of Jewish intellectual history from antiquity to the seventeenth century.

Since the period in which the Jewish liturgy was standardized, there has hardly been a time when it was not in a state of flux. Friedland explores the countless ways that the Siddur, Mahzor and Haggadah have been adjusted or transformed so as to faithfully mirror modern Jews' understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their sancta.

Reeves demonstrates that the motifs of Jewish Enochic literature, in particular those of the story of the Watchers and Giants, form the skeletal structure of Mani's cosmological teachings, and that Chapters 1 to 11 of Genesis fertilized Near Eastern thought, even to the borders of India and China.

This volume makes available the 1585 edition of the Seder mitzvot hanashim, in Yiddish and English. The book was intended to teach Jewish women in sixteenth-century Poland the rules, rituals, and customs pertaining to the sexual life of couples within the context of marriage. Edward Fram sets the work in its bibliographical and historical contexts.

Hebrew literature, from the second half of the 19th century to well into the 20th, was unmistakably influenced in style and substance by Russian prose and poetry. Rina Lapidus systematically identifies those Hebrew authors and poets upon whom Russian influence is most striking and upon whom it seems to have exerted the greatest power.

The eighteen studies in this book continue the exploration of the Jewish sermon Saperstein began in his groundbreaking Jewish Preaching 1200-1800. His new research further illustrates the importance of this genre, largely ignored by modern scholarship, as an indispensible resource for understanding Jewish history, spirituality, and thought from the High Middle Ages to the beginning of the Emancipation in Europe. Saperstein's thematic studies explore the most important occasions for traditional rabbinic preaching: the Days of Awe and the Passover season. Two studies focus on the homiletical exegesis of classical Jewish texts, and two deal with the historical interaction of Christians and Jews. Saperstein discusses the diffusion of philosophical ideas through homiletics and identifies central conceptual issues presented in the Italian Jewish pulpit. Other essays include a critical analysis of the work of Saul Levi Morteira of Amsterdam, an examination of sermons in eighteenth-century Prague for indications of a traditional community in crisis, and homiletical evidence for a developing sense of patriotic identification with the state, even before Emancipation changed the legal status of the Jews. Saperstein also presents newly discovered sermonic texts in order to explore a full panoply of issues relating to historical context and genre. All are published for the first time with his annotated translation accompanying the Hebrew original. Included are a Guide for Preachers, sermons on repentance and on the Binding of Isaac, and three eulogies, the last a fascinating memorialization of the antisemitic empress Maria Theresa.

Within traditional Jewish commercial law, the laws of sale and fraud are surprisingly intelligible and fascinating for modern students of Jewish tradition. This translation of the relevant sections of the Shulhan Arukh, sometimes known as the ‘Code of Jewish Law’, has been prepared with the utmost care and attention to the technical nuances of legal terminology in both modern and ancient law. The Shulhan Arukh is the most widely consulted of the various legal codes in Judaism. Rabbinic tradition is in large part a tradition of law and jurisprudence. This tradition of law comprehends fields as diverse as the law of evidence and the dietary regimen, as laws on credit and debt and the laws of ritual purity. It follows naturally that many, if not most, of the great works of rabbinical literature are law books, commentaries on the law, and collections of cases. The principal legal code, or restatement, still authoritative among traditional Jews, is the Shulhan Arukh, compiled by Joseph b. Ephraim Karo of Safed (1488-1575) and glossed by Moses Isserles of Cracow (1520-1572). This work, published in four volumes, provided the rabbinic jurist or magistrate, as well as the learned layman, with a concise review of the various areas of Jewish law that might come to his attention. One such area of traditional Jewish law was the laws of buying and selling and the laws of fraud in sales. This particular domain within traditional Jewish commercial law is surprisingly intelligible and fascinating for modern students of Jewish tradition. Buying and selling are just as much a part of the modern world as they were of past ages. Moreover, the student of legal history or comparative law will find that this rabbinical code on sales and fraud in sales provides, at a glance, a view of the strata of Jewish legal development from the ancient period to the sixteenth century. Among the matters treated in this code are the formation of the agreement to buy and sell, the concept of acquisition as it relates to various types of property, legal capacity, and the requirement of good faith. The chapters on fraud reflect the moral and ethical values of Jewish tradition which are always implicit, and often explicit, in the rules of Jewish civil, criminal, and commercial legal codes. The material is clearly of interest to modern students of business ethics. A synopsis of the law of sale prefaces the work. It underscores some of the main features of this area of the law and furnishes some terminology and analysis of the material. While this synopsis does note some points of contrast and comparison with Roman law and medieval church law, it is not intended as a detailed historical or comparative study. It serves principally to introduce the text itself and establish some useful lines of understanding and classification. The translation of the laws of sale and fraud presented here has been prepared with the utmost care and attention to the technical nuances of legal terminology in both modern and ancient law. Its apparatus of notes and references includes material on the history of the printing of this translated portion of the Jewish legal tradition.

It was twentieth-century Modernism that introduced bilingualism into the literary arena. Used as a means for the contradictory aims of universalizing or individualizing the literary idiom, this practice was clearly part of the revolt against nineteenth-century Romanticism and nationalism. In contrast, Jewish bilingualism is rooted in the long history of exilic existence; its modern phase, moreover, is intimately related to the national revival of the Jewish people. As such, it fulfilled a unique role: time and again, literary experiments were conducted first in Yiddish, the spoken language, and later transferred to Hebrew, the "romantic classical" language of the national renaissance. The significance these transfers had for the historical poetics of Hebrew cannot be overestimated. They were instrumental in making what was a "scriptural" literature only a century ago into the modernized, lively literature we know today. Yet Hebrew did not give in easily. It was not until the 1950s, for instance, that Israeli poetry caught up with the poetic understatement of Western Modernism. Two decades earlier, however, Hebrew Modernism did make a breakthrough in America. It was Gabriel Preil, a Lithuanian-born resident of New York, who helped modernize Hebrew verse without so much as visiting the Land of Israel. The emergence of his imagistic free verse in the thirties and forties constituted a bold departure from the classical-romantic norms of Hebrew at the time. Thereafter Israeli modernists adopted him as a precursor, naturally attributing his innovations to the influence of Anglo-American imagism. But there is more to it than that. For Preil, who is currently approaching his 75th birthday, is, in fact, the latest link in the Jewish tradition of intracultural transfer. As this study shows, he absorbed his poetic modernism from the New York Yiddish Modernists, thereafter transferring it to Hebrew via his autotranslation and dual compositions. Yael Feldman here sheds light on this particular, and possibly last, instance in the history of Jewish bilingualism. Yet the significance of her work extends beyond the poetics of Hebrew literature. For it offers unique insights into both the mechanism of literary transfer and the constraints operative within it. In addition, it follows Preil's recent "metapoetic" journey to the borders of imagism and back, thereby illuminating the risks of limitation and dehumanization that have always plagued "pure" imagism. Finally, it shows how Preil's life work recapitulates the complex evolution of Western poetic Modernism with all its inherent paradoxes.

The century following the death of Maimonides (1204) witnessed widespread upheaval and turmoil as anti-rationalist Jews attempted to ban the study of philosophy. For such rationalist philosophers as Shem Tov ibn Falaquera (c. 1225-1291), however, Judaism could not be restricted to the confines of the spiritual and intellectual ghetto; the free minds of Jews could not be shackled in the name of Judaism. In many respects, Falaquera epitomizes the way in which philosophy succeeded in finding a home in Judaism in the Middle Ages. The pioneering philosophical efforts of earlier luminaries made an enduring impact on the course of Jewish history and the religious and intellectual life of the Jewish people through their Hebrew translation and cultural consolidation at the hands of Jewish philosophers like Falaquera. As a prolific Hebrew poet, translator, popularize of science and philosophy, encyclopedist, defender of Maimonides, Bible commentator, historian of philosophy, and philosopher in his own right, Falaquera manifested a loving commitment to both Torah and secular wisdom (hokhmah, Sophia) and the conviction that both Torah and Sophia ultimately must be in harmony, if not identical. Raphael Jospe's exhaustive study of the life and thought of Shem Tov ibn Falaquera provides students of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy for the first time with a systematic and comprehensive presentation of Falaquera's philosophy. Reflecting Falaquera's own philosophic and curricular priorities, the book focuses in particular depth on his psychology, in light of and in comparison to his Arabic sources. In the tradition of scholarly text analysis, the book also offers a critical Hebrew edition and annotated English translation of Falaquera's systematic psychological study, Sefer Ha-Nefesh (Book of the Soul), as well as a critical and annotated edition of his previously unpublished ethical work, Shelemut Ha-Ma'asim (Perfection of Actions), and - also for the first time - the surviving fragments, with English translation, of Falaquera'a Bible commentary.

The Jewish Encyclopedia was the first comprehensive collection of all the available material pertaining to the Jews, their history, literature, philosophy, ritual, sociology and biography. Published by Funk & Wagnalls from 1901 to 1906, its successful completion was due to the pluck and determination of its managing editor, Isidore Singer, and to the dedication of its other editors and collaborators, many of whom were world-renowned scholars. Today, the JE has been largely superseded as a reference work, but as a repository of information about Jews and Judaism in the late nineteenth century, it remains a gold mine. Part One of Schwartz’s book recounts the lively story of the JE’s publication the nascence of the idea, the negotiations with Funk & Wagnalls, the assembling of the board of editors, and the tensions, rivalries, and financial problems that constantly plagued the project. She introduces those who played leading roles in the numerous reviews and announcements that accompanied its publication, and evaluates its significance as the premier cultural event in American Jewish life at the dawn of the twentieth century. In Part Two, an analysis of the JEs contents reveals both the nature and extent of Jewish scholarship at the time and the goals and concerns of those who produced it. As Schwartz demonstrates, the JE marshalled its facts to combat both racial anti-Semitic arguments and Christian polemics. The work summarized, preserved, and expanded upon the results of Wissenschaft des Judentums. It provided the beginnings of a Jewish cultural response to the intellectual challenges of Darwinism and higher biblical criticism. And it presented the unique Reform and modern traditionalist perspectives on Jewish practice and belief. Throughout this fascinating study, Schwartz explores the complex and frequently strong relationships among Jewish leaders. Most importantly, she demonstrates that through its content as well as through the very fact of its publication in the United States and in English, the Jewish Encyclopedia signified the transfer of the centre, language, and leadership of Jewish scholarship from the Old World to the New, thus becoming a primary catalyst for the emergence of Jewish scholarship in America.

When the Karaites successfully dissociated themselves from the Rabbanite Russian Jews with the creation of the Karaite Religious Consistory in 1837, the result was a schism within Judaism unprecedented since the rise of Christianity. Philip E. Miller sets this event in the context of the history of the Russian Karaites from their origins to the present, focusing on economic and political concerns that led to the schism. The Karaites' separatism shielded them from the horrific fates suffered by the Rabbanites under the tsars, under Hitler, and under Stalin, but it ultimately led to their nearly complete assimilation and disappearance as a people. The central character in Miller's study is Simchah Babovich, a Crimean Karaite whose wealth and prominence enabled him to curry favor with the imperial Russian government. In 1827, Babovich traveled to St. Petersburg on behalf of the Karaite community and petitioned the tsar for exemption from military conscription legislation that applied to all Jews in the realm. Accompanying him on the journey was Joseph Solomon ben Moses Lutski, the leading Karaite religious scholar of Evpatoriia. Lutski's chronicle of the mission, the Iggeret teshu'at Yisrael (Epistle of Israel's Deliverance), is reprinted here as an annotated Hebrew text with English translation. In colorful detail, the Iggeret records the delegation's travel adventures, their activities as guests and tourists in the imperial capital, the swift granting of Babovich's request, and the Karaites' euphoric reaction when the successful petitioners arrived back home in Evpatoriia.

In 1937, the young Yiddish poet Berl Feldman bade farewell to his family in Radzivil and emigrated to the land of Israel, where he became the Hebrew poet Amir Gilboa. In this comprehensive study, Warren Bargad describes and interprets Gilboa's works at the various stages of his career and defines his place in the tradition of modern Hebrew poetry. Spanning nearly fifty years and collected in eight volumes, his works reflect the multiplicity of norms that dominated Israeli poetry in the thirties and forties as well as the personal artistic vicissitudes that moved Gilboa from one set of poetics to another in the course of his life's work. Bargad explains the romantic themes and lyrical style that characterize Amir Gilboa's early poetry as the combined result of his leaving behind the strident tone of Yiddish proletarian verse and his fervid enthrallment with the Land of Israel as a source of spiritual, ideological, and personal fulfillment. Later, Gilboa experimented with other approaches: the poetics of figurative profusion in the 1940s, the poetics of ambivalence in his Holocaust poetry, the poetics of ideological lyricism in the 1950s, and the poetics of ambiguity in his later modernist phase. From the late 1960s until his death in 1984, Gilboa created a highly idiosyncratic blend of romantic preoccupations and new modernist structures. Bargad addresses two additional dimensions of Gilboa's poetry: its multiple linguistic strata and its autobiographical nature. Although Gilboa's frequent borrowings from the language of Hebrew romanticism show his abiding attachment to the modes of expression of Bialik and his followers, the dominant narrative voice in all of Gilboa's poetry is his own. He describes past experiences and everyday incidents-his frustrations, his delights, his sorrows. Even in his poems on biblical figures, where the poetic voice is most distanced, a live image of the poet emerges. The result is an interweaving of autobiography, even if a mythical one, and ancient history. The poems on poetry and the poetic process go much further, disclosing a virtually unmasked autobiographical voice, one which provides much of the force, fervor, charm, and poignancy of Gilboa's unique style.

Since the period in which the Jewish liturgy was standardized, there has hardly been a time when it was not somehow in a state of flux. Eric L. Friedland explores the countless ways that the Siddur, Mahzor, and Haggadah have been adjusted, amplified, or transformed so as to faithfully mirror modern Jews' understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their sancta. In the tradition of liturgologists such as Elbogen, Idelsohn, and Petuchowski, Friedland focuses on latter-day adaptations of the prayerbook, giving proper recognition to the recent concern for intellectual integrity, cultural congruity, group and individual self-redefinition, and honest speech in Jewish prayer. The prayerbooks themselves are witnesses to innovation in the Jewish liturgy. From David Einhorn's Olath Tamid (Baltimore 1855), to Isaac Mayer Wise's Minhag Amerika (Cincinnati 1857) and Marcus Jastrow's 1873 revision of Benjamin Szold's Abodath Israel (Baltimore 1864), Friedland analyzes evidence of creativity in British and American Reform Jewish liturgy. Various rites for the Days of Awe provide a particularly accurate glimpse of how Jewish communities here and abroad experience the sacred, consider eternal mysteries, and communicate with God. Friedland also sets the Reform Gates of Prayer in historical and denominational perspective by considering it alongside the Reconstructionist Kol Haneshamah, and the Israeli Progressive HaAvodah shebaLev. The state and direction of liturgical change emerges from a survey of commonalities and divergences in nineteenth- and twentieth-century prayerbooks in terms of Sephardic and mystical influences, attitudes toward the messianic hope, and collective sentiments of forgiveness or vengeance toward Israel's enemies. Liturgical approaches to the commemoration of the Ninth of Av suggest that even an ancient fast day can recover relevance, credibility, and authenticity for Liberal Jews in the postmodern era.

Jewish life in early modern Poland was characterized by an adherence to Jewish law (halakhah) that Polish Jewry had inherited from medieval Franco-German Jewry, and almost all aspects of Jewish activity, even the most personal of matters, fell within its purview. Jewish law remained constant throughout the ages in some areas, but in others rabbis were forced to reinterpret it in light of the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Fram draws upon the ordinances of Polish Jewry's political leadership, Polish legal records, and the responsa of some of the outstanding poseqim of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show how Polish jurists responded to those complexities. His case studies, gleaned from a period of exceptional creativity in the annals of Polish Jewry, deal with weddings on the Sabbath, the rights of daughters to familial wealth, women in the marketplace, the personal reliability of those who dealt in the sale of kosher wine, competition among Jews for sources of livelihood obtained through leases (arendy), the transfer and payment of personal debts via bills payable to bearers (membrany), and personal insolvency. Concerned with the needs of the underprivileged as well as those of the marketplace, these rabbis struggled to maintain the integrity of Jewish communal life and to preserve the tradition they perceived to represent divine law. Particularly in commerce, failure to observe Jewish law or at least the independent direction taken by the lay leadership often became the basis for communal legislation and practice. Fram shows how the Polish community, at times consciously and at times unconsciously, transformed some of its traditional values until they may have been unrecognizable to Jews from an earlier age..

Titles have always been conferred on persons both to identify their functions in society and to assign honorary status. In Egypt even more than in Mesopotamia, function-related and honorary titles were so valued that officials and functionaries of varying stations collected the titles accrued in their lifetime and preserved them in a titulary, the ancient equivalent of a resume. Israelites serving at the royal courts in Jerusalem and Samaria or in local administrations also held title, but the sources suggest far fewer of them than their neighbors. Nili Fox analyzes the titles and roles of civil officials and functionaries in Israel and Judah during the monarchy, including key ministers of the central government, regional administrators, and palace attendants. The nineteen titles fall into three categories: status-related titles, function-related titles, and miscellaneous designations that could be held by a variety of officials. Fox sets these Israelite and Judahite titles in their ancient context through extensive study of Egyptian, Akkadian, and Ugaritic records. She also draws upon the corpus of Hebrew epigraphic material, which allows her to explore economic components of state organization such as royal land grants, supply networks, and systems of accounting, which would be impossible to understand on the basis of the Hebrew Bible alone. Fox also treats the widely debated issue of whether Israelite state organization was influenced by foreign models and, if so, how much. The evidence of non-Hebrew sources offers little concrete material to substantiate theories that Israel modeled its government after a foreign prototype, and Fox offers a more finessed approach. Many features of Israelite administration are best explained as basic elements of any monarchic structure in the ancient Near East that developed to satisfy the needs of an evolving local system. Other seemingly foreign features have a long tradition in Canaan and probably were naturally assimilated. Fox recognizes the interconnections between the cultures in the region but emphasizes the need to closely examine the Israelite system with internal evidence.

Hebrew literature, from the second half of the nineteenth century to well into the twentieth, was unmistakably influenced in style and substance by Russian prose and poetry. These influences have been readily acknowledged but have been studied only in an episodic and fragmented way. Rina Lapidus systematically identifies those Hebrew authors and poets upon whom Russian influence is most striking and upon whom it seems to have exerted the greatest power. After examining the textual parallels in the works of both the influencing and the influenced authors, she presents intertextual sources for the passages discussed, focusing on various idioms or linguistic and literary patterns commonly found in Russian literature. Nine case studies illustrate this influence. For each case, Lapidus answers three questions: How, precisely, is the literary influence expressed? With what belletristic, intellectual, ideological, or philosophical category may it be connected? and What were its primary sources, even before the influencing author absorbed them from authentic Russian culture? Lapidus explores the influence of Russian language, literature, and culture upon Y. H. Brenner in his novel Around the Point; the influence of the Russian version of decadence as found in Turgenev's novels Rudin and Fathers and Sons on Yeshaya Bershadsky's novel Aimless; the poetics of humor and satire in the fiction of Gogol and Mendele Mocher Sefarim; the influence of classic Russian autobiographical novels-primarily the Tolstoy trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth-on Y. D. Berkowitz's Chapters of Childhood; the impact of the poetry of Afanasii Fet on Hayyim Lensky; Russian influences on two novels by Hayyim Hazaz; and the poetic influence of Mikhail Lermontov on the works of the young Saul Tchernichowsky. A theoretical introductory chapter discusses the contributions of Harold Bloom, Julia Kristeva, and others to the contemporary study of influence.

Sifra is the earliest extant rabbinic commentary on the book of Leviticus. On a basic level, Sifra presents and validates rabbinic law, but this was done by creating a link between a proposition, halakhic or not, and a scriptural passage. Scholars in the last few decades-including Neusner and Stemberger-have debated Sifra's relationship to Mishnah-Tosefta. Howard Apothaker demonstrates that the set of rules in Dibbura deSinai on topics shared with Mishnah-Tosefta can be understood as an independent body of law. They share a common ancestor but represent different expressions of a similar worldview and with variant purposes. The framers of Sifra sought as their main objective to validate the essentiality, or non-superfluity, of every word of Scripture. Apothaker's analysis of the exegetical and rhetorical characteristics of Sifra in Sifra, Dibbura de Sinai: Rhetorical Formulae, Literary Structures, and Legal Traditions builds on his translation of and commentary on the section of Dibbura deSinai which covers Leviticus 25-27. Analysis of Sifra's highly formalized rhetoric yields insight concerning the general purpose(s) for which the framers created the work.

It is not common to think that Jews were interested in happiness or that Judaism has anything to say about happiness. On the contrary, the concept of happiness was a central concern of Jewish thinkers. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson shows that rabbinic Judaism regarded itself primarily as a prescription for the attainment of happiness, and that the discourse on happiness captures the evolution of Jewish intellectual history from antiquity to the seventeenth century. These claims make sense if one understands happiness as human flourishing on the basis of Aristotle's thought in the Nichomachean Ethics. Linking virtue, knowledge, and well-being, Aristotle's analysis of happiness can be traced in Jewish understanding of human flourishing as early as the Greco-Roman world, but the fusion of Greek and Judaic perspectives on happiness reached its zenith in in the Middle Ages in the thought of Moses Maimonides and his followers. Even the controversies about Maimonides' ideas could be viewed as discussions about the meaning of happiness and the way to attain it within Judaism. Much of this book, then, concerns the reception of Aristotle's Ethics in medieval Jewish philosophy. This book shows how a certain notion of happiness reflects the intellectual culture of a given period, including cultural exchanges among Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Demonstrating the discourse on happiness as a dramatic interplay between Wisdom and Torah, between philosophy and religion, between reason and faith, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson presents, to specialists and non-specialists alike, a fascinating tour of Jewish intellectual history.

Maverick Israeli poet Yona Wallach (1944-1985) is often remembered for her outrageous and unconventional personality and the controversies engendered by her sometimes shamelessly erotic verse. But she is regarded by many of her friends and colleagues as the most important among the Israeli poets of her generation, perhaps even the greatest Hebrew poet of modern times, and has had a profound effect on Israel's cultural life ever since her works began to appear in periodicals in the early 1960s. Zafrira Lidovsky Cohen presents the first full-length critical analysis in English of her works, exposing the roots of her poetry in the poetic revolution in Israel during the 1950s and explain how she epitomizes the literary climate of her time. Wallach's poetry reflects the cultural crises that shook the academic world of the 1960s and the intellectual battles many artists fought with the prison-house of semiotic systems in which the human mind, they felt, was entrapped. Mysticism, religion and prophecy, passion, genius, sex, and madness are only some of the terms associated with this woman and her poetic art, which one critic has called a "unique combination of elements of rock and roll, Jungian psychology and street slang, break-neck pace and insistent sexuality." Cohen paints a background for Yona Wallach's poetry by outlining her short life and surveying her critical reputation. Drawing on her own rich and varied background in Bible, mythology, Hebrew language, and Poststructuralist and Postmodernist literary and linguistic theory, Cohen traces Wallach's poetic corpus, translates and interprets representative examples of her works, and situates them within a variety of historical and literary contexts.

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.

A major influence on the development of rabbinic liturgical custom after the destruction of the Temple was the need to establish that this innovative worship of the heart was as acceptable to God as biblically prescribed sacrificial worship. Later Jewish communities and their leaders continually refined the details of the system they inherited to reflect their changing understandings of acceptable, meaningful, and constructive worship. These understandings have in turn been shaped not only by liturgical halakhah and active custom, but by new intellectual and social currents and by the vicissitudes of Jewish history. Ruth Langer uses the tools of historical scholarship and anthropological study of ritual to analyze some of the dynamics that have shaped Jewish liturgical law and determined the broader outlines of the prayer life of the Jews. After a consideration of the talmudic issues upon which the acceptability of prayer depends, she offers a basic list of legal principles derived by later generations from talmudic literature to ensure that prayer takes the form of blessings composed according to a very specific pattern and invoking God in a very precise way. She then investigates the development and implementation of the corollary that invoking this blessing formula in ways that deviate from the specific directions of the Talmud constitutes precisely inefficacious and even dangerous prayer. Questions about appropriate prayer language go beyond the blessing formula to the contents of the prayers themselves. Langer analyzes the battles fought over the legitimacy of inserting liturgical poetry into the fixed texts of the statutory liturgy and over the requirement of community for the proper recitation of certain prayers, specifically those that include the angelic liturgy. Although in each of these controversies the rabbis compromised by reinterpreting either legal theory or custom-or both-to bring them into harmony, their solutions have never been monolithic or simple. In its lucid illumination of those complexities, To Worship God Properly adds to our understanding of the history of Jewish liturgy and the general history of rabbinic leadership and law.

How did Jewish women in sixteenth-century Poland learn all the rules, rituals, and customs pertaining to the sexual life of couples within the context of marriage? As in other areas of ritual life that concerned the household, it would seem that the primary source for the education of Jewish women was other women. But rabbinic law dictates that Jewish women who experience uterine bleeding are prohibited from having physical contact of any kind with their husbands, and the intricate laws of niddah (enforced separation) spell out exactly when and under what circumstances physical marital relations, even simple touching, can be resumed. Particularly difficult issues could be addressed only by rabbis or other learned men, since women rarely, if ever, attained the level of rabbinic scholarship necessary to pare the details of these complicated laws. To educate both men and women, but particularly women, in a more systematic and impersonal manner, the young rabbi Benjamin Slonik (ca. 1550-after 1620), who later became one of the leading rabbinic authorities in eastern Europe, harnessed the relatively new technology of printing and published a how-to book for women in the Yiddish vernacular. Seder mitzvot hanashim (The Order of Women's Commandments) illuminates the history of Yiddish printing and public education. But it is also a rare remnant of a direct interface between a member of the rabbinic elite and the laity, especially women. Slonik's text also sheds light on the history of Jewish law, particularly the reception of the Shulhan Arukh, an important legal code that had just been published. This volume makes available the 1585 edition of the Seder mitzvot hanashim in Yiddish and English. Fram sets Slonik's work in its bibliographical and historical contexts, demonstrating its relationship with the Shulhan Arukh, exploring how rabbis opposed formal education for women, considering how upheavals accompanying geographic shifts in the Ashkenazic community help explain how the women's commandments texts came to be used in Poland, and offering a treasure trove of information on the place and roles of women in Polish-Jewish society. Fram thus creates a composite picture of how Slonik, along with other men of his time, perceived the main audience for his work and sought to connect it to contemporary texts.