Editor’s Note

Abstract

Editor’s Note David N. Myers The study of jewish law has deep roots in Jewish history. With due respect to philosophers and mystics, halakhists assumed a position of millennial dominance in Jewish intellectual culture from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Paris Sanhedrin in 1808. The study of Jewish law did not disappear but became a subsidiary field of the larger project of modern Jewish studies—from the Wissenschaft scholars Zecharias Frankel, I. H. Weiss, and D. Z. Hoffmann to the adepts of mishpat ‘ivri such as Asher Gulak and later Menachem Elon, to a diverse network of global scholars today, including Suzanne Stone and her charges at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization (who are amply represented in this forum). Meanwhile, the study of Jewish history became the central axis of modern Jewish scholarship, exemplified and enabled by the macrohistorians Jost, Graetz, Dubnow, and Baron—and enriched by the evolution of many subfields including intellectual, political, economic, social, gender, and global branches. While the study of Jewish law indeed had deep roots in Jewish history, its encounter with the modern discipline of history was episodic and unsystematic. Recent decades, however, have yielded a far more textured meeting of the subfields of Jewish law and Jewish history, in no small part instigated by the pathbreaking impetus of the late Yale legal theorist Robert Cover. The present JQR forum is the result of a collaboration between the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law at the Harvard Law School. The Katz Center is in the midst of a two-year cycle of seminars devoted to Jewish legal cultures that brings together historians and legal scholars, among others. The Julis-Rabinowitz Program has burst onto the scene with great energy, hosting a wide range of events on themes in and around Jewish law; in January 2022, the Julis-Rabinowitz Program cosponsored with JQR and the Katz Center a symposium on the [End Page 599] encounter between Jewish legal theory and Jewish history. This forum draws on the ideas and participants of that symposium. We are grateful to Noah Feldman, director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program, for providing an introduction. [End Page 600] Copyright © 2022 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies