Judaic Studies Research Articles

Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture (review)

Reviewed by Tamar Alexander Director of Moshe David Center for Ladino Culture Head of Folklore Program, Ben Gurion University of the Negev Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture, edited by George K. Zucker. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2005. 230 pp. $39.95. This anthology is edited by George Zucker, who is a professor emeritus of Spanish language and literature at the University of Northern Iowa. It includes 17 articles written by different researchers and performers, divided to 5 sections. Naturally it is an interdisciplinary collection. The three main sections are (a) history, sociology, anthropology, (b) language, literature, philosophy, and (c) music and dance. In addition, there is an introduction in which Isaac Levy describes, through a personal journey, the Sephardim and Sephardic scholarship. He examines different definitions for the term "Sephardi." In the epilogue, entitled "The Future of the Sephardim," Michael M. Laskier reports on the goals and activities of the Sephardic Educational Center in Jerusalem. In his illuminating preface, the editor summarizes the different articles while interweaving them in a short history of the Sephardim. [End Page 189] At the end of the book there is a list of the contributors, their affiliation and main publications in Sephardic research and an index of subjects and names, both of which are very helpful to the reader. As for the format of the book, it is pity that it is printed in such small letters. The goal of this collection, as stated by the editor is, "to be a link in the chain that connects Sephardim and their way of life, their values and priorities . . . to the present . . . to aid the field of Judaic studies . . . studying the changes (in that culture and that tradition) . . . augment the knowledge that can be applied to other cultures and other groups"(p. 6). The book covers a very wide range of issues, from before the expulsion from Spain in 1492, till today. That is, it covers more than 500 hundred years in terms of a variety of aspects and disciplines. The article by Tracy Harris concerns the language spoken by the Jews in Spain before the expulsion, while that by Moshe Hallamish deals with Don Isaac Abravanel. The "conversos" (converted Jews) are not excluded from this collection and are dealt with in articles by Nechama Kramer Hellinx, about Antonio Enríquez Gómez and by Jack Weiner, about the anti-Semitic converso Sebastían de Horozco. The Iberian exiles in the 16th-century Ottoman Empire are discussed by the historian Abraham David. The life of the exiled Sephardim in other settlements (what is called the second exile which occurred later) is discussed by Eva Alexandera Uchmany in "Spain, Portugal and their Colonies"; by Gloria Mound, "The Balearic Islands"; and by Annette Fromm, "Ioannina." Different aspects dealing with the creative parts of this culture are discussed by Judith Brin Ingber (dance) and David Jordan Harris and Judith Cohen (music). Yitzchak Kerem deals with the press in Salonika, and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt discusses the power of speech, a study based on a field-work she conducted with her husband, Isaac Lévy, among the Sephardic communities in the Balkans, the Dodecanese Islands, and Turkey. However, it is little wonder that such a collection cannot be totally inclusive. For example though the third section is entitled "Literature," there are no articles on the main genres of the Sephardic literature, like Midrash MeAm Loez, the copla, romances, or even proverbs and tales. Neither are there any articles on the Haketia-speaking Sephardic group in northern Morocco. The historical section does not deal with such an important subject as the Holocaust, in which entire Sephardic communities were eliminated. This publication is based on papers presented at a conference, which limits the possibility of building a collection according to one solid and clear concept. The title of the book, "Sephardic Identity" creates the expectation for a discussion of who the Sephardim are and what...

Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. By Nancy Sinkoff. Brown Judaic Series, no. 336. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004. xvi, 320 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Maps. $39.95, hard bound.

Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in the Polish Borderlands. By Nancy Sinkoff. Brown Judaic Series, no. 336. Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2004. xvi, 320 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Maps. $39.95, hard bound. - Volume 66 Issue 1

The Commerce of the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine among Jews in the Greco-Roman World (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 383 Reviews more open to contacts with non-rabbis, both characteristics shared with Palestinian sages but not earlier Babylonian sages. His innovation in this book is his connection of this shift in behavior with similar shifts in other eastern cultures, including Christianity. Throughout, Kalmin’s analysis is nuanced and balanced. He takes into account opposing explanations of texts, explains why his are preferable and openly admits when the text does not reveal much about a given topic. He is aware that his theses often rest on sparse textual evidence. His argument that there is a significant shift in the mid-fourth century in the depiction of the learning and behavior of Babylonian sages is convincing and raises a challenge to Rubenstein who dates most shifts in rabbinic culture to the later period in which the Babylonian Talmud was redacted. His differentiation between the behavior of Babylonian and Palestinian sages, a focal point of his entire career, continues to be enlightening. How these textual analyses impact our larger understanding of Persian culture in this period remains to be more expansively argued. Joshua Kulp The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Jerusalem, Israel kulp@uscj.org THE COMMERCE OF THE SACRED: MEDIATION OF THE DIVINE AMONG JEWS IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD. By Jack N. Lightstone. Pp. xxiii + 171. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2006. Paper, $26.50 This book focuses upon the religious practices of Diaspora Jews in late antiquity. The author, Jack Lightstone, presents Judaism pursuant to the categories and taxonomies utilized within the discipline of history of religion . This analysis of the rituals and beliefs of Jews, outside of the orbit of rabbinic Judaism, is highly influenced by religious methodologies. The main topics addressed are: magicians and divine men; the dead and their tombs; the life of the Torah in the Diaspora; the synagogue rituals; the synagogue and the early church; Philo and philosophic mysticism. Lightstone’s book is a reprint of his first edition, which was published in the Brown Judaic Studies Series in 1984. The updated bibliography by Herbert Basser, as well as the index, renders this reprint very accessible to both the scholar and the student. One of the strengths of the book, as discussed in the foreword by Willi Braun, is a different conceptual perspective of late antique Judaism due to its utilization of the methodologies of religion. Nevertheless, this reviewer takes Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 384 Reviews issue with Braun’s reductive characterization of Wissenschaft des Judenthums as “extra- or pseudo-historical…” in his foreword. In my opinion , Wissenschaft des Judenthums was adamantly opposed to pseudohistorical descriptions, and it had additional agendas, such as the scientific study of Judaism. It attempted to study Jewish texts and Jewish history with similar methods that were applied to the scientific study of other people’s histories and texts—thus removing them from a discourse of transmitted “religious truths.” This scientific approach to Judaism may be compared to the developments in biblical archeology that were stimulated by general archeology , consequently abandoning such chronology as the “time of Abraham” and instead dating according to the framework of general archeology. The problems and challenges of Jews living in the Diaspora in antiquity are elucidated in a creative manner in this book. The Alexandrian Jew Philo used a Greek model, including a metropolis, to describe the realm that Jews occupied outside the Land of Israel. Lightstone invokes this famous passage from Philo which identifies Jerusalem as the mother-city. From Philo’s comment, Lightstone implies that the ancient Mediterranean world was dotted with Jewish colonies. Lightstone notices the ethnic solidarity of Jews in the Diaspora and their struggle to search for places that would mediate the sacred, since they lived far from the Jerusalem Temple. In Philo’s case we may note that he undertook the pilgrimage to the sacred center of Judaism, the Jerusalem Temple. The author relies upon the methodologies of his teacher, Jacob Neusner, and Jonathan Z. Smith; thus Lightstone treats texts and archeological findings as data that may be analyzed through the taxonomies of the history of religion and additional, systematic categories, as well as systemic relationships . Based upon his analysis of...

Religious Identities in Contemporary American Life: Lessons From the NJPS

The appearance of this special issue marks a significant contribution to the sociological understanding of religion and highlights key issues facing the field as we move into a new century. We owe a debt of gratitude to the sponsors of the National Jewish Population Survey and to Harriet Hartman for making this issue of Sociology of Religion possible. A concentrated look at one religio-ethnic group is important both for the particular knowledge it provides about that group and for the way it raises ques tions about more general social processes that may be at work. This set of articles is exemplary of both those things. It adds to the impressive body of scholarship on Jewish life that has emerged out of the growing number of Judaic Studies departments and centers and programs now at over a hundred universities and colleges in the U.S. We learn about the particular differences among Jewish denominations and between U.S. Jews and Israeli ones. We learn about the effects of Orthodox gender expectations and the importance of Jewish federa tions. But we also learn about the significance of social networks in ethnic and religious continuity, as well as the multifaceted, intertwined, and changing nature of religious and ethnic identity not just for Jews. The changing nature of religious identity is a central theme to which we will return, but it is also important to note just contentious that fact has been in the very execution of this study. That difficulty is reflected both in the fine, com prehensive review of the literature provided by Hartman and Kaufmann at the beginning of this issue and in the long methodological discussions contained in nearly every article. The how of this project has needed to be explained. Each of these articles has made impressive use of the data, but each was constrained by decisions others had made.

Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bayonne and Peyrehorade

Journal Article Becoming Jewish in Early Modern France: Documents on Jewish Community-Building in Seventeenth-Century Bayonne and Peyrehorade Get access David Graizbord David Graizbord The Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, The University of Arizona, 845 N. Park Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85721 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 40, Issue 1, Fall 2006, Pages 147–180, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2006.0081 Published: 01 October 2006

Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison

Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison Author(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein Source: The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (Fall, 2006), pp. 498-509 Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25470181 Accessed: 14-04-2015 19:14 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Pennsylvania Press and Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Jewish Quarterly Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.97.227.198 on Tue, 14 Apr 2015 19:14:41 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Blood, Soul, Race, and Suffering

Seeking to destabilize static truths about the Jews as an unchanging and uncanny people, this article advances full-bodied ethnography. Full-bodied ethnography, with its double focus on the embodied subjects of research and the bodies of researchers, and the meanings conveyed by both, involves mutual participation in the social process: Ethnographers and their hosts together enact, and hence entrench, cultural categories. Yet at the same time, the unmediated sensual interactions of fullbodied ethnography also challenge, if not blow apart, the verity of these categories. A review of fieldwork that I conducted among Jews, non-Jews, and those precariously placed on the Jewish/non-Jewish divide suggests that Judaic Studies and cultural anthropology can benefit from the pursuit of full-bodied ethnography to steer a course aimed at getting beyond the fixity of race and ethnicity.

In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (review)

In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France, by Maud S. Mandel. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 317 pp. $23.95. Armenians and Jews differ in most things, including religion, origins, language, and socio-economic profile. Armenians are an ancient Christian community, one of the oldest in the world, whose origins lie in the Anatolian plateau of Asia Minor. Although Jewish roots may be traced to ancient Israel and Judah, for nearly two millennia Jews have been a diaspora community with shifting centers of concentration, from Rome, to Spain, to western Europe, to eastern Europe and Russia, to the United States, and most recently to modern Israel. Armenian is an Indo-European language; Hebrew is Semitic. Yiddish is a Germanic blend written in Hebrew, and Ladino is a blend of medieval Castilian, combined with Hebrew, Turkish, and Arabic. Until the latter half of the 19th century, Armenians were peasant farmers living in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, while most European Jews were an urban population, prohibited from farming, earning its living as merchants, petty-traders, money-lenders, and skilled craftsmen. Despite these many differences, Armenians and Jews share tragic modern histories in the Ottoman Empire and Europe, respectively, where they experienced massacres and genocide. The Armenian Genocide of 1915-23 destroyed more than half of Ottoman Armenians, while the Holocaust exterminated two-thirds of European Jewry. Both of these disasters, and the decades of violence that preceded them, produced refugee populations as well as bitter memories of persecution and survival for both peoples. Different though they may have been, Armenians and Jews share the common experience of massive violence, trauma, survival, flight, and the attempt to reestablish a normal existence in strange new lands. In the Aftermath of Genocide is Maud S. Mandel's attempt to compare and contrast the similar and yet different experiences of these two communities in twentieth-century France. After the First World War, France was the principal place in Western Europe to which Armenians and Jews fled, seeking shelter and recovery. It was a modern, republican, democratic country with a strong tradition of assimilating immigrants and rejecting separate ethnic development. However, during the Second World War, Armenian and Jewish paths in France diverged: for the most part Armenians were not victimized, but French Jews and Jewish refugees, who had sought shelter in France before the war, were targets of the Nazis and their accomplices in Vichy. What happened to the two traumatized communities under these changing conditions? Specifically, what was the Armenian communal reaction in the interwar period in France following the genocide of 1915, and what was the Jewish reaction following the Holocaust? How did these two communities deal with their violent pasts? How did they assimilate or not assimilate to France? What were their relations with their communities in the diaspora, and with the new states, Armenia and Israel, that rose like two phoenixes following the two genocides? Mandel, who teaches in the History department and the Judaic Studies program at Brown University, has written an important, complex, and fascinating study. …

DAVID T. RUNIA and GREGORY E. STERLING (eds): The Studia Philonica Annual. Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, vol. XIII: In the Spirit of Faith: Studies in Philo and Early Christianity in Honor of David Hay, and vol. XV: Laws Stamped with the Seals of Nature: Law and Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy and Philo of Alexandria. (Brown Judaic Studies, 332 and 337.)

DAVID T. RUNIA and GREGORY E. STERLING (eds): The Studia Philonica Annual. Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, vol. XIII: In the Spirit of Faith: Studies in Philo and Early Christianity in Honor of David Hay, and vol. XV: Laws Stamped with the Seals of Nature: Law and Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy and Philo of Alexandria. (Brown Judaic Studies, 332 and 337.) 304 pp. (vol. XIII), 199 pp. (vol. XV). Providence: Brown University, 2001 (vol. XIII) and 2003 (vol. XV). - Volume 68 Issue 3

The Corporeal Turn

The Corporeal Turn Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor, and Professor of Performance Studies, Affiliated Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies What has been called the "corporeal turn" in recent Jewish studies is provoking anxiety. If "Judaism's mind has been more interesting and more influential than Judaism's body," a distinction worthy of study in its own right, critics are calling for "a swing back to its more traditional mooring in the text (which, in any case, has often dealt with the body)." But those who took the corporeal turn never left the text behind. Rather, they brought a concern with the body to the text and found new ways to read and think about those texts. What troubles the critics would seem to lie elsewhere. Reviewing several books published in the 1990s, Hillel Halkin characterized the trend as "feminizing Jewish Studies," which he did not intend as a compliment.1 The problem was not that their authors ignored the text.2 Rather, it was the way they read the texts; their approach was marked, in his view, by "postmodern thinking," skepticism, a "non- to anti-Zionist" stance, an affirmation of "Diaspora Jewish identity," and above all an open embrace of feminism and feminist theory (and, though he does not say so in so many words, a preoccupation with sexuality and homosexuality). Non-Orthodox Jewish America is, in his view, suffering from deep confusion, exacerbated (if not caused) by the "sexual revolution," and this kind of work just makes things worse. A firestorm ensued, fueled a few months later by Gabriel Schoenfeld's wholesale condemnation of "the voguish hybrid known as gender studies" in Holocaust scholarship.3 [End Page 447] Claiming that this trend "does not yet have a name," Halkin called it "the new Jewish scholarship." A year earlier, Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin had announced "the new Jewish cultural studies," and a year later The Chronicle of Higher Education published its own assessment of "the new Jewish studies."4 In an endorsement for the Boyarins' book, Eric Santner defined the new Jewish cultural studies as work that brings "to bear recent innovations in the study of gender and sexuality on readings of canonical Jewish texts."5 While this may represent a corporeal turn in Jewish textual studies, it does not represent the full potential for a corporeal turn in Jewish studies more broadly conceived, a topic to which I will return. What is new in "the new Jewish cultural studies" is not only the concern with gender and sexuality (corporeality is not to be limited to these important topics in any case) but also the cultural turn in literary studies and the emergence of cultural studies.6 Text has not gone away. Rather, the corporeal turn has intensified interest in text and offered new ways to think about text as a social, corporeal, and material practice.7 [End Page 448] If anything, text is everything. So powerful a metaphor for culture has text become that anything usefully understood as text has become fair game for "reading," including film, performance, landscape, image, fashion, the city, and last but not least, the body—note that Daniel Boyarin's appointment at the University of California is in "Talmudic culture" and Carnal Israel is subtitled "reading sex in Talmudic culture" (emphasis added).8 Scholars speak of "writing the body." They speak of the body as "the inscribed surface of events."9 "Socially inscribed," the body "becomes the text that is written upon it."10 But, as Elliot Wolfson has demonstrated so eruditely in Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism, the textualization of the body and embodiment of text are not new Jewish preoccupations. The people of the book are also the people of the body, to paraphrase Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, an early contributor to the new Jewish cultural studies, and, as even canonical Jewish texts amply demonstrate, the body is not only good to think about, it is also good to think with.11 Has an interest in the body lessened the "textualist" emphasis in Jewish studies? No. But it has altered "its traditional mooring in the text" by changing where and how scholars are...

The Catholic Church and the Jews: Introduction To This Special Section of Shofar

At a Western States Jewish Studies Association Conference in Tempe, Arizona a small group of Jewish and Christian scholars came together to discuss the implications of the release of the Vatican's Statement, Iesus (DI), in the year 2000. These papers continue to have significance even a few years after the original discussion. To these original papers we have added the response of the distinguished Catholic scholar, Dr. Eugene J. Fisher, Associate Director, Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, U.S. Conference of Bishops. The first paper, written by Samuel Edelman, Director of Modern Jewish and Israel Studies at the California State University, Chico, was meant to offer the context of Christian/Catholic discussion over the last 60 plus years. This paper, Supersessionism Rears Its Ugly Head, categorizes the Jewish-Catholic dialogue as centered around ambiguity and ambivalence, pitting right-wing Catholic against left-wing Catholic in a behind-the-scene conflict in spite of the current Pope's public and positive embrace of Jews and Judaism in ways few in the Catholic have done since Pope John XXIII. Steven L. Jacobs, Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama, wrote the second paper. Dominus Iesus: Why This? Why Now? lays out in a logical and precise way the ironic twists and turns of Iesus. Jacobs argues persuasively that, Given the advancing age and increasing physical infirmities of the incumbent Pope, John Paul II; the power of the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic in the person of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger...Dominus Iesus is an attempt by those in positions of power within the to reverse the seemingly more liberal progress made by the incumbent prior to the election of his successor, to undo, as it were, the perceived falsely relativistic position of the (i.e., one among many) and restore it to its pre-Vatican II/Nostre Aetate understanding of No salvation outside the Church. The third paper, Church Faith and Religious Belief: A Reading of by Peter Haas, Abba Hillel Silver Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Samuel Rosenthal Center for Judaic Studies at Case Western University, posits the argument that the authors of Iesus were using the cloak of the of pluralism to attack pluralism. The having set into place 40 years of dialogue now seems bent on using language that marks a clear retreat back to pre-Vatican II exclusivity. Using a close textual analysis of the text of Iesus, Haas concludes by saying: What is likely going on here is just the surface manifestation of a much deeper and profound struggle over the future of the in the twenty-first century. The fourth paper, Impressions of Catholic Statements, by the distinguished Protestant scholar, James F. Moore of Valparaiso University, provides us with a Derrida-like post-modern analysis of not only the Catholic text but also of the avid interest of Jewish Studies scholars in this Catholic text. His claim is that the document is intended to restrict quite directly the scope of what these leading teachers can officially teach as Catholic theology. Yet, having said this, Moore begins to plumb the depths of both unintended and possibly intended consequences of Iesus. He concludes with singularly brilliant insight that If the aim of such a theology is both to eliminate certain views about Jews and others from Catholic teaching and thus to reinstate a particular memory about Christianity, then this would mean that the impact of Jewish studies, that is, the views of Jews about various topics, would be dramatically reduced in those places that do Christian studies, that is, among those who would teach about the themes that Jesus addresses. Above all, we lose the long-standing effort to reaffirm the Jewish roots of Christianity at least in part, and we lose sight of the important gains we have made in thinking about the Jewish Jesus, like the efforts I have made to re-think Christianity by seeing Jesus as preeminently a Jewish teacher teaching from within the Jewish tradition. …

Editors' Introduction

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) vii–ix E D I T O R S’ I N T R O D U C T I O N WHEN IN 1889 ISRAEL ABRAHAMS and Claude Montefiore launched the Jewish Quarterly Review as the first English-language journal of Jewish studies, their avowed aim was twofold. ‘‘One prominent portion of our new quarterly,’’ they wrote, ‘‘will be devoted to the past—to the better knowledge of Jewish history, literature, and theology in bygone days.’’ The editors, both Englishmen entering their fifth decade, added, however , that while the past would ‘‘receive its due share of attention, the present, in which we live, and through which the future is determined, must not be neglected.’’ Moreover, they expressed the hope that even the knowledge of the past offered in the pages of their journal would be not only ‘‘attractive and valuable to the pure scholar’’ but also presented ‘‘in such a form as to prove interesting as well as novel to the ‘general reader.’’’ It was their sincere belief that ‘‘these two objects are not by any means necessarily inconsistent.’’ As part of their commitment to the present, Abrahams and Montefiore published during their first year essays by Heinrich Graetz on ‘‘The Significance of Judaism for the Present and Future’’ (the lead article of the inaugural issue) and Israel Zangwill on ‘‘English Judaism.’’ At the same time, they published sober scholarly meditations like S. R. Driver’s article on ‘‘The Origin and Structure of the Book of Judges’’ and David Kaufmann ’s note on ‘‘The Word for Unhappy in Later Hebrew.’’ When, after twenty volumes, the founding editors decided ‘‘with much reluctance’’ to discontinue serial publication of JQR, they expressed greater satisfaction with its contribution to the study of ‘‘Biblical and later Jewish literature and theology’’ than with the degree to which it had served as a ‘‘medium for a living Theology.’’ Consequently, the nonacademic side of the journal was abandoned by the editors of the new series, Solomon Schechter and Cyrus Adler, who assumed responsibility for JQR in 1910 after publication rights were acquired two years earlier by the recently founded Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (of which Adler was president and Schechter a member of the Board of Governors). ‘‘The fact that the REVIEW has passed from the hands of private individuals into those of a learned institution with a strict academic character,’’ they explained somewhat haughtily, ‘‘makes it incumbent upon the Editors to formulate their policy according to the The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. viii JQR 94:1 (2004) model of academic publications. This will necessitate the exclusion of all matter not falling within the province of Jewish history, literature, philology , and archaeology, though popular articles on these subjects, if they are conceived in a scientific spirit and bear the marks of original research, will be readily admitted.’’ For nearly a century, JQR has followed this charge, serving as a bastion of scholarly excellence—indeed, as a home to work ‘‘conceived in a scientific spirit and bear[ing] the marks of original research.’’ Presided over by a line of distinguished editors extending from Adler and Schechter through Abraham Neuman and Solomon Zeitlin to Leon Nemoy to David Goldenberg, the journal has developed a well-deserved reputation for its meticulous scholarship and textual erudition in a number of important areas of study. Our goal, as JQR’s new editors, is a challenging one: to preserve that attention to textual detail so unmistakably identified with the journal and yet to recapture the original aim of the first editors of reaching a wide and diverse audience. This means expanding the circle of contributors and readers of JQR, appealing to both the ‘‘pure scholar’’ and the ‘‘general reader.’’ With this in mind, we plan to publish innovative work that traverses the many disciplinary and chronological boundaries of Jewish studies. In the new JQR, the ancient will stand alongside the modern, the historical alongside the literary, the textual alongside the contextual...

Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion (review)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 176–177 YAAKOV ELMAN and ISRAEL GERSHONI, eds. Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion. Studies in Jewish Culture and Society. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xi Ⳮ 353. This book is a collection of essays derived from a year-long group on the theme of the transmission of knowledge in Jewish culture that was held at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania during the academic year 1995–96. The group comprised scholars working in virtually every period and area of Jewish studies, from the Hebrew Bible and rabbinics through medieval and early modern Jewish culture into the modern period and in fields as diverse as German and Yiddish literature, Jewish musicology, and Zionism. The ten essays in this volume reflect this wide historical span as well as the group’s disciplinary and thematic variety, with essays ranging from Martin Jaffee’s comparative study of rhetoric and paideia in the Talmud Yerushalmi and in Greco-Roman literature, to Jeffrey Grossman’s engrossing study of translation technique in early twentieth-century German translations of Y. L. Peretz, to Israel Bartal’s essay on the Kinnus Project as a tool of cultural fashioning in early Zionism. Beyond the excellence of nearly all its individual components, however , this collection is a remarkably coherent volume with a contribution of its own. It is especially important for the ways that it develops its main theme, namely, as its editors write in their introduction, how ‘‘the transmission of various cultural elements is affected by the mode of transmission .’’ Whether that ‘‘mode of transmission’’ is oral or literary, or in the form of translation, or in the anthologizing of earlier sources, the importance of foregrounding and highlighting this all too often neglected dimension of textual study cannot be overestimated. Indeed, the import of this volume’s diversity is to show how the question of the mode of transmission should be a subject of vital concern to all scholars in Jewish studies regardless of field or period. It is hardly a topic that begins with the age of print. Without disparaging the important contributions of the essays dealing with the modern period, like those of Bartal and Grossman, it is fair to say that the most exciting essays in the book are those devoted to ancient and medieval texts. Let me just cite a few of the more original and innovative contributions. Paul Mandel’s study of the different recensions of Lamentations Rabbah expertly moves beyond philology to use its evidence ELMAN AND GERSHONI, JEWISH TRADITIONS—STERN 177 as source material for speculations upon modes of teaching and the role of books in Palestine and geonic Babylonia respectively. Daphna Ephrat and Yaakov Elman’s joint contribution is an exemplary model of innovative comparative work, in this case of the use of orality in the geonic yeshiva and the Islamic madrasa; Malachi Beit-Arie’s paper on medieval scribality focuses upon the highly creative role of scribes in copying texts and the implications of their interventions in how we conceive of a text. Similarly, Mark Saperstein’s study of the sermon as an oral performance also works to blur the lines between orality and written transmission, as does Elliot Wolfson’s masterly study of the intercalation of oral tradition and written communication in the transmission of esoteric literature. The essays in this volume reflect the influence on Jewish studies of what has come to be called the ‘‘new materialist philology,’’ to use Stephen Nichols’s term—that is, the methodologically self-conscious and rigorous extension of traditional philological study from purely textual matters to larger questions of literary and cultural significance. The text, as we know, is not only a conveyor of knowledge but also a medium of cultural exchange. Jewish studies has of course been a text-centered discipline from its inception. But as this volume demonstrates, we still are in the process of learning how much a text—in its full material sense— can actually teach us. University of Pennsylvania DAVID STERN ...

"Epigraphical" Rabbis, Helios, and Psalm 19: Were the Synagogues of Archaeology and the Synagogues of the Sages One and the Same?

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 27–76 ARTICLES ‘‘Epigraphical’’ Rabbis, Helios, and Psalm 19 Were the Synagogues of Archaeology and the Synagogues of the Sages One and the Same? S T UAR T S . M I L L E R INTRODUCTION HALAKHIC SOURCES FROM THE talmudic era until the present frequently refer to the synagogue (bet keneset) and the house of study (bet midrash) in the same context, conveying the sense that the rabbis have always regarded the bet keneset as an institution akin to the academy. Indeed , rabbinic use of the phrase, ‘‘houses of assembly [i.e., synagogues] and houses of study’’ (batte kenesiyot u-vatte midrashot) is so idiomatic one can only conclude that, whenever and wherever they lived, the rabbis perceived not only the bet midrash but also the bet keneset as under their influence and jurisdiction.1 Despite this well entrenched rabbinic perspective, contemporary traditional synagogues display a significant degree of liturgical, architectural, and artistic variation that oftentimes does not conform to recognized haI wish to thank Professor Lee I. Levine, who invited me to present my preliminary thoughts on this topic before a Yale University faculty forum in March 2000. Professors Steven Fine of the University of Cincinnati, Jay Berkovitz of the University of Massachusetts, and Gary Rendsburg of Cornell University read earlier drafts of this study and offered welcome criticism, which compelled me to reconsider or further augment some of my views. 1. A simple search for twçrdm ytbw twysnk ytb in the Bar Ilan Judaic Library database reveals that the phrase was in continuous use from antiquity to the present in contexts that suggest that the two institutions were often perceived as ‘‘rabbinic .’’ For its use in talmudic sources, see the discussion below of yMeg 3, 74a and cf. S. S. Miller, ‘‘The Rabbis and the Non-Existent Monolithic Synagogue,’’ Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Greco-Roman Period, ed., S. Fine (London/New York, 1999), 63–64. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 28 JQR 94:1 (2004) lakhic opinion.2 This, of course, is not a new phenomenon. From the talmudic era to our own times, the rabbis have questioned synagogue practices that clashed with or even threatened some basic halakhic principles . Of particular concern to the rabbis, surprising in view of its continued prevalence today, has been the use of figurative art that might be construed either as a violation of the second commandment or of Ex 20:20 (‘‘. . . you shall not make any gods of silver, nor shall you make for yourselves any gods of gold’’).3 Drawing upon earlier talmudic sources, medieval arbiters of halakhah (poskim) struggled with such questions as whether depictions of animals (and humans) in synagogues should be seen as violations of the biblical proscriptions on imagery or, at the very least, as distractions from the concentration required for prayer.4 Most famously, R. Elyakim ben Joseph of Mainz (late twelfth century) re2 . The variety found in construction of the meh .itsah separating men and women in the orthodox synagogue comes readily to mind, but so do many liturgical practices that are either not sanctioned or are outright prohibited by many or even most authorities. On the meh .itsah, see B. Litvin, ed., The Sanctity of the Synagogue : The Case for Mechitzah—Separation between Men and Women in the Synagogue— Based on Jewish Law, History, and Philosophy, from Sources Old and New (3rd rev. ed., Hoboken, 1987). For a discussion of the interplay of custom (minhag) and rabbinic authority where liturgy is concerned, see R. Langer, To Worship God Properly: Tensions between Liturgical Custom and Halakhah in Judaism (Cincinnati, 1998). Cf. D. Sperber, Minhage Yisra’el: Meqorot Ve-Toledot (7 vols., Jerusalem, 1990–2003), I: 20–38 and II: 76–125, who discusses halakhic responses to ‘‘wrongful custom’’ (minhag ta‘ut) in general and includes several examples that pertain to the synagogue . 3. These concerns are raised already in tannaitic sources. See Mekhilta de-Rabbi Yishmael...

"I am a memory come alive": Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 123–148 ‘‘I am a memory come alive’’ Nahum Glatzer and the Legacy of German Jewish Thought in America EUGENE R . SHEPPARD AT THE CENTENARY ANNIVERSARY of Nahum Glatzer’s birth (1903– 1990), one cannot help but be struck by the enormous contribution he has made to the field of Jewish studies.1 As a teacher, mostly at Brandeis University (1950–1973), he attracted and trained a generation and a half of Jewish studies scholars. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Michael Fishbane, Arthur Green, and Everett Fox are just some of the more prominent figures who have studied under Glatzer during the last forty years. These figures were drawn to Glatzer as a teacher who possessed an intimate command of Jewish sources and thinkers, ranging from the Bible to Franz Rosenzweig .2 Glatzer’s portraits of the cultural giants of interwar Central European Jewry in particular—Rosenzweig, Kafka, Agnon, and Buber, to name just a few—to an English-reading audience in the United States still function as the prism through which many readers have come to appreciate the rich legacy of a pre-Holocaust European Jewish voice. While Glatzer was recognized at an early age as having an unusual command of Jewish texts, at no point in his pre–World War II career was he considered among the most powerful or original thinkers in Jewish stud1 . This essay was inspired by a series of conversations I had with my teacher and former colleague Arnold Band. Previous versions of this paper were presented at the Graduate and Faculty Colloquium in Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, October 24, 2002, and then at the Association for Jewish Studies conference on December 18, 2002. I thank the participants of both forums for their valuable insights and criticisms. I also thank Sylvia Fuks Fried, Ora Band, Courtney Booker, Susan Cho, and David Myers for their helpful suggestions. 2. There are several published accounts of Glatzer as a teacher. See, for example , the introduction to Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday by his Students, ed. M. Fishbane and P. R. Mendes-Flohr (Leiden, 1975). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 124 JQR 94:1 (2004) ies. Yet, Glatzer’s portrait of Franz Rosenzweig in particular was so successful in capturing the imagination of American Jews, and later, German Christians and Israelis, that this little-known figure has become one of the two German Jewish philosophers most recognizable to an educated American Jewish audience, the other being Martin Buber. It is time to examine more carefully Nahum Glatzer’s scholarship in order to assess its impact in the field of Jewish studies.3 In particular, we will investigate three overlapping literary genres of Glatzer’s work: biography, textual interpretation, and above all anthology. To argue that the decisive characteristics of a scholar’s career can be located in her or his anthological work—a genre that would seem merely to gather and collect the voices of others—may strike us as counterintuitive. But Glatzer ’s manifold efforts as an anthologist reveal a distinctive persona and legacy. This article analyzes his work through the optic concept that best describes Glatzer’s anthological craft: a prism. A prism refracts and bends a ray of light as it passes from one medium to another. Glatzer’s prismatic approach to Jewish studies became most clearly operative when he discussed a recurring moment in the history of Jewish thought: the point at which a notable Jewish figure steps back from the precipice of abandoning Judaism. I now turn to the task of recapturing some key characteristics of the early career of this intriguing figure. A BRIEF SKETCH OF GLATZER’S EARLY CAREER Norbert Glatzer was born on March 23, 1903, in Lemberg, Galicia. In 1915, Glatzer’s family became part of the exodus of Jews from Galicia to German-speaking areas that took place in the years surrounding World War I and settled in Tetschen...

Textuality and Subsurface Traditions

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 3–5 Textuality and Subsurface Traditions MICHAEL F ISHBANE MY LIFE IN SCHOLARSHIP has been marked by an intellectual and personal obsession with the textuality of cultures—beginning with their foundational expressions, as articulated both within and against alien forms; their new creation of textual habitats, so that diverse cultural identities could be shaped and re-formed; and their ongoing renaissance or self-revolution, whereby these textual cultures were often radically revised or transformed. My path has taken me from the philologies and documents of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible through the varieties of rabbinic cultures of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and into types of modern Jewish thought and theology. Commentary or text interpretation is a quintessential element of the historical Jewish text cultures , at once sustaining primary texts themselves and producing new patterns of primacy that must be interpreted in order to be transcended, used, or even evaded. I have therefore devoted my attention to the textual details and logics of commentaries, and how they mark the formative and transformative mentalities of culture—Jewish biblical culture, in particular . The histories of commentaries thus trace the interior structures of culture, thought, and thinking. A task of scholarship is to find and mark these traces, accessing and assessing them as best one can. As I have matured and come to understand my task and service to culture, this has been my self-appointed task. Texts and commentaries ostensibly bring life forms of the imagination into view, though in many cases the residues and patterns of this evidence have left various kinds of obscurities. These require not only recognition but reconstruction. I would like to mention three topics in this regard, which have variously engaged my attention over the years—separately and simultaneously. One topic demanding recognition and reconstruction is the need to locate and retrieve the mentalities of thought and logic found in scriptural exegesis in its many forms. In my work, this has included the materials The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 4 JQR 94:1 (2004) within the Hebrew Bible itself, as well as the vast library of interpretation of Scripture from antiquity to the present. Thus hermeneutics is a window into modalities of the cultural mind and its forms of reason. One must always reconstruct the mental structures and reasoning from the cited comments, intuiting just what was perceived by and of concern to the interpreter who made this or that interpretative intervention. In this way, one might gain some sense of the modes of textual perception and thinking at different cultural moments, as well as some of the remarkable ways that prior theologies or values were insinuated into the text so that the text might appear to warrant and support certain perspectives. In those cases where the type of interpretation may be intuited from the text itself, we gain some understanding of the ways that the biblical text was read, and of the presumed aspects of its coherence or incoherence; and in those cases whereby the teachings are not directly derived from the text, we may intuit patterns of ideas that were projected upon the texts, so that they might be justified or valorized. Either way, we gain some access to modes of the cultural mind, as it unfolded in history, through the prism of scriptural interpretation. This is precious evidence and must be treated with respect and integrity. Another matter involving strategies of retrieval and reconstruction has also preoccupied me since my earliest studies, and that is the matter of subsurface culture and continuities. This topic made its first impression upon me when I became aware of certain legal terms and mythic themes that occurred in the texts of the ancient Near East, sometimes wholly skipped the Hebrew Bible, and then resurfaced with vigor in early or later rabbinic sources. I became engrossed in the problem of survivals and hidden traditions, and thus the methodology of their retrieval. Early work in magic yielded much...

Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part I of II)

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 77–108 Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part I of II) HAYM SOLOVEITCHIK *AN HISTORIAN HAS NO RIGHT to claim extraneous influences unless he or she can show that the conclusion arrived at by the thinker is so atypical that unless something impinged, consciously or unconsciously, upon his thought he could never have arrived at the conclusion that he did. I have called this elsewhere ‘‘detecting an angle of deflection.’’1 If, however, the line of reasoning is a valid one, and one could envision another jurist without such a parti pris arriving at the same conclusion, the historian has no right to attribute it to outside forces. This is not to say that in such instances the individual was not influenced by an extra- *Much of the analysis contained in this article was presented at a series of seminars on martyrdom sponsored by the Collège de France and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in May and June 1999. I would like to thank Barber Johanssen and Maurice Kriegel for inviting me to give the series. A subsequent presentation at a seminar on Jewish hermeneutics held by the program of Jewish studies of the University of California of Los Angeles in March 2000 helped clarify some issues. My thanks to David Myers for his kind invitation and to Arnold and Ora Band for hosting my stay in Los Angeles. I am further indebted to David Berger, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Amnon Lindner, and Kenneth Stow, who were kind enough to read and comment upon the manuscript. This article was completed and submitted to the JQR before the appearance of Simh .a Goldin’s comprehensive and nuanced study of martyrdom in Ashkenaz in the High Middle Ages, ‘Alamot Ahevukha: ‘Al-mavet Ahevukha (The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom) (Lod, 2002). Had this fine study, which will serve as the point of departure of all subsequent discussions, been available to me when I was composing this essay, I would have added a footnote here and modified a phrasing there but scarcely altered the argument, as we are in general agreement. In one sense, this narrow-gauged, methodological essay on the uses of legal texts for the study of cultural axioms simply buttresses a number of points in Goldin’s broad, empirical study. 1. ‘‘Can Halakhic Texts Talk History,’’ AJS Review 3 (1978): 174–175. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 78 JQR 94:1 (2004) neous force, only that the historian has no basis for claiming that he or she was. The question which next poses itself is: How does one know what a typical mode of reasoning is for a specific jurist or thinker? Often this is a major stumbling block, but not when studying the great set of medieval French glosses known as the Tosafot.2 These dialectical glosses have dominated the study of the Talmud since the time of their promulgation in the early thirteenth century and have been printed alongside of the Talmud since the 1530s. All serious talmudic study begins with the study of these glosses, and the contradictions that they have pointed out and the solutions propounded by them are the staple diet of halakhic thought to this day. Any student of the Talmud lives in daily, intimate contact with the Tosafot. There are few, if any, thinkers whose thought processes are so familiar to us. Indeed, generally the epistemological problem is not whether we can reconstruct their normal train of thinking but whether we can think in a mode other than tosafist, so deeply have they imprinted themselves on our minds, so thoroughly have they shaped our approach to halakhic issues. This is not to say that we understand every gloss, nor that all their arguments are convincing, even to sworn dialecticians. However , the difficulties that we encounter are usually subtle, not gross errors of inference, and certainly not strings of gross errors. When we do encounter an agglomeration of logical leaps...

Coping experience among students in higher education

The study examines the coping strategies among 130 undergraduate college and university students with learning disabilities (LD) and 146 students without learning disabilities (NLD). Students completed self‐reported instruments designed to measure stress, support and strategies. The findings revealed that students without LD reported higher work stress, higher combined stress and more social support than did students with LD. Students without LD were more task orientated and perceived more support than students with LD, while students with LD used more emotional coping strategies than NLD students. Differences were also obtained regarding age and gender. The study highlights the importance of further investigations with a larger sample and the support sources of students with LD, and suggests developing task‐oriented coping strategies designed especially for students with LD. Background variables of participants Students with LD Students without LD Variables (n=130) (n=146) Gender Male, 62, 60 Female, 68, 86 Area of studies: Humanities1, 10, 4 Social Sciences2, 88, 83 Natural Sciences3, 10, 16 Exact Sciences4, 15, 25 Not reported, 7, 18 Personal status: Single, 89, 93 Married, 41, 50 Divorced, 0, 3 Notes: 1Humanities: Literature, Judaic Studies, History, Art, Music. 2Social Sciences: Psychology, Education, Economics, Management, Sociology, Communication Studies. 3Natural Sciences: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology. 4Exact Sciences: Mathematics, Computer Science. Notes: aRanged from 1 to 4; c ranged from 1 to 5; branged from 1 to 7., *p <0.05; **p <0.01; ***p <0.001

Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World (review)

Reviewed by: Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World Jeanne Kay Guelke Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World, edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 513 pp. $28.95. Judaism and Ecology is one of seven edited volumes in a series on major religions and the environment published by the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University. Related volumes address Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and indigenous traditions. Articles appearing in these volumes previously appeared as presented papers and discussants' remarks during a series of conferences in 1996-98. This volume contains 17 articles and four responses plus introductions, principally by scholars of Jewish religious thought, with significant representation from the Jewish Theological Seminary. These and other American symposia and consultations on religion and the environment generally stem from the root belief that a religious worldview affects all facets of public life for religious faith communities, and thus religious people must understand environmentalism through their religion's teachings. A less charitable interpretation is that both Christianity and Judaism have been relative late-comers to the environmental movement, in part because these faiths have not placed ecology at the center of their theologies, and consequently such volumes represent a rear-guard effort to have something meaningful to contribute to longstanding secular debates about global change. An even more sardonic view that was popular in the 1970s positions "the Judeo-Christian tradition" as the root cause of the environmental crisis, thanks to Genesis mandates for man to populate and subdue the earth, and a preference for saving souls over saving wildlife. Orthodox Judaism provides particular challenges for environmentalists, however, because of its commitment to basing contemporary thought and action in halakha or rabbinic tradition. Yet it is equally clear that mainstream religious leaders including American rabbis are speaking out against environmental threats, and that they can wield sufficient political influence to make a positive difference in environmental issues. There is also a grassroots Jewish movement to develop environmental leadership programs and synagogue- or community center-level practical approaches to local environmental mitigation. The Harvard series' stated goals were to identify the ecological attitudes, values, and practices of its seven religious traditions; environmental commonalities within and between faiths; the religions' desired modes of human conduct; and their needs for further study (p. xxiii). Consequently it seems most fair to assess Judaism and Ecology according to these criteria. I should mention, however, that my specialization is in environmental and not Judaic studies, and consequently I may have overlooked the theological advances represented in this volume. Many of the papers addressed specific theological and philosophical concepts such as creation, materiality, natural law, mysticism, and the nature of G-d. These were worked out through contexts such as Kabbalah, Hasidism, liturgy, literary approaches [End Page 189] to specific biblical texts, and the thought of Abraham Heschel and Martin Buber. Most of the papers appeared to be original research on a specific topic, rather than systematic overviews of principal themes in Jewish environmentalism. I found all of the papers to be erudite, gracefully reasoned, and informative about selected aspects of Jewish theology and philosophy, yet mostly disconnected from anything ecological in the contemporary sense. I would have hoped for the authors to make a special effort to link more explicitly their religious expertise either to ecology as a natural science, to the practical environmental management issues of today, or even to Nature as a humanities construct. I was simply left wondering, in paper after paper, why so little of the Jewish environmental literature, or indeed any environmental literature, was cited or discussed; let alone with incisive critical engagement. Readers looking for Judaism's take on major trends in humanistic environmentalist thought, such as eco-justice, gender issues, environmental values, or pragmatism, for example, will find scant evidence. The editor's own efforts to foreground the volume with larger issues of Judaism and environmentalism are commendable, but were brief and unable to counterbalance the esoteric weight of the majority of papers. But more seriously, the transcendent character of much of this volume collectively implies that Judaism, after all, has no robust insights and prescriptions for today's environmental...

Necrology: Leon Uris (1924-2003)

T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Fall 2004) 666–671 Necrology Leon Uris (1924–2003) STEPHEN J . W HITFIELD MOST FAMOUS FOR Exodus, the American novelist Leon Uris died in 2003, at the age of seventy-eight. Though he wrote nearly two dozen other books, including other novels on Jewish themes, such as Mila 18 (1961) and The Haj (1984), Uris’s reputation rests on the 1958 ‘‘novel of Israel’’ that ranked first on the New York Times bestseller list for nineteen straight weeks and remained near the top of the list for over a year. The hardcover edition has never gone out of print, and by 1965 the Bantam paperback edition had sold more than five million copies. American mass taste has occasionally found a place for propaganda novels. But the most influential of these works addressed domestic problems , such as the moral horror of slavery (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the ugliness of urban working conditions (The Jungle), or the plight of migrant farmers (The Grapes of Wrath). Exodus was remarkable, and not only because it is set abroad. The book was published in an era when American Jewish interest in Israel was slight and the levels of philanthropy and tourism were, by later standards, low,1 and when ethnicity was muted or disdained as an embarrassing vestige of the receding immigrant past. There was no precedent—before or after—for an American novelist to produce a Zionist epic that would create a publishing sensation. The year that Doubleday released Exodus, former prime minister David Ben-Gurion asserted , ‘‘As a piece of propaganda, it’s the greatest thing ever written about Israel.’’2 Uris, who claimed to have flunked English three times before he dropped out of a Baltimore high school to join the U.S. Marines, was not the sort of writer who stirred the admiration of literary critics; and Jewish scholarship has paid very little attention to his work. For example, a 1. David Biale, Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (New York, 1986), 184. 2. Quoted in Edwin McDowell, ‘‘Exodus in Samizdat: Still Popular and Still Subversive,’’ New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1987, 13. The Jewish Quarterly Review (Fall 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. LEON URIS (1924–2003)—WHITFIELD 667 standard work like the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers (1984) provides entries on obscure writers like Bruno Lessing and Roberta Silman, but not on Leon Uris. Not that this reference volume slights middle-brow writers. There are biographical and critical essays on Edna Ferber, Gerald Green, Ben Hecht, and Laura Z. Hobson. Even writers who distanced themselves fully from the Jewish community (like Tillie Olsen) are profiled. Or take Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia (1992), which omits Leon Uris entirely but is sufficiently encyclopedic to refer to Aaron Rubin and Joe Stein, for example. (They happen to have been gag writers for Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, so the volume cannot be charged with bias against mass culture.) The spleen that Uris sometimes emitted in interviews against intellectuals does not therefore seem unwarranted. The implication of literary scholar Arnold Band’s assertion, during a 1989 conference, that Exodus ‘‘is certainly a major document in modern Jewish history’’ has rarely been pursued. Only essays by Henry Gonshak and Rachel Weissbrod come to mind—and neither author, rightly, cares to make a case in terms of strictly literary merit. For Gonshak, Ari Ben Canaan is significant as the anti-shlemiel, as the alternative archetype of the fighting Jew. According to Weissbrod, that Exodus is not critically esteemed owes to Uris’s refusal to see black and white as gray. His rigid good versus evil paradigm collided with the ambiguity that is a fundamental tenet of modernism.3 A Nobel laureate who went to Jerusalem and back a decade after Uris had gone there has formulated the problem that fiction like Exodus bequeaths . Perhaps ‘‘the survivors of Hitler’s terror in Europe and Israel will benefit more from good publicity than from realistic representation...