Rabbinic Authorities Research Articles

Messianism and Modernity: Jacob Frank and the Sexual Politics of Transgression in Jewish Eastern Europe

Messianism and Modernity:Jacob Frank and the Sexual Politics of Transgression in Jewish Eastern Europe Adam Sutcliffe Pawel Maciejko , The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Pp. 376. $65.00. Ada Rapoport-Albert , Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816 (Oxford, UK, and Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization). Pp. 402. $64.50. The mercurial messianic leader Jacob Frank (1726-1791) is probably the most colorful and intriguing figure in eighteenth-century Jewish history. He was born in Podolia, where his family, like many Jews in this notably heterodox province on the eastern borderlands of Poland, was associated with the heretical Sabbatian movement, which had first emerged in the 1660s around the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Zevi (1626-1676). In the early 1750s in Salonika, Frank established close contacts with a group of the Dönmeh, a clandestine Islamic sect made up of descendants of those disciples of Sabbatai who, following their leader's enigmatic conversion to Islam in 1666, later also outwardly adopted the Muslim faith. In 1755 he returned to Podolia, declaring himself Sabbatai's messianic heir. Following the discovery of his involvement in an antinomian, highly sexually transgressive ritual in a Podolian village in 1756, the local rabbinic authorities imposed a communal ban [herem] on him and those associated with his movement. After this, with much ceremony, Frank and approximately 3,000 others converted to Christianity and were at first warmly welcomed by the Polish Catholic Church. But Frank's charismatic messianism and his enduring grip on his followers soon gave rise to ecclesiastical anxieties, and a half-hearted attempt was made to isolate him in a monastery in Czestochowa, where he was secluded for thirteen years. On his release in 1773 he joined a group of prominent supporters in Brünn (Brno) in Moravia. After a quarrel [End Page 299] with Emperor Joseph II, the Frankists left the Habsburg territories in 1786. Many of them then settled in the German town of Offenbach, where after Frank's death his daughter Eva continued to lead the movement until her own death in 1816. Frankist communities, occupying an ambiguous cultural space between Judaism and Christianity, were a significant presence in both Warsaw and Prague in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and to some extent beyond that time. This singular story has received plenty of attention, both from serious and not-so-serious historians. However, an up-to-date and rigorously scholarly study of the Frankist movement has long been lacking. This is now more than remedied by this excellent pair of books, both of which guide their readers through this highly complex, contested, and at times lurid and mysterious terrain with exemplary erudition and clarity. Maciejko pieces together the Frankist narrative with much greater subtlety and archival assiduousness than has any historian hitherto, and thoughtfully situates the movement within the wider context of late Enlightenment Europe. Rapoport-Albert's focus is both broader and more narrow. She traces the prominence of women, and the place of women's sexuality and agency, from the seventeenth-century beginnings of Sabbatianism to the death of Eva Frank, situating this no less thoughtfully within a wider interpretation of the status of women in Hasidism. The different perspectives of these two books are complementary rather than competitive, and together they raise the study of eighteenth-century Jewish messianism to an entirely new plane. The theme that most strongly emerges from Maciejko's work is the extent to which the Frankist movement blurred and destabilized the boundary between Judaism and Christianity. In the 1750s, the leading German rabbi Jacob Emden was so horrified by the erotic antinomianism of the Frankist circle and other Sabbatians that he argued that the Christian authorities should be persuaded to burn them at the stake in response to the common threat this universal heresy posed to both legitimate religions (54-57). This strategy backfired catastrophically; in 1759, shortly before their mass conversion to Catholicism, leading Frankists approached the Polish ecclesiastical authorities offering to demonstrate, in a disputation with rabbis, that the Talmud did indeed endorse and require the Jewish ritual use of Christian...

L’implication politique des juifs dans la cité à Marseille au XIVe siècle, entre normes et pratiques

This paper deals with the issue of the exchanges and forms of cooperation generated by the opposition between Christians and Jews as a result of Jews’ political involvement in 14th-century Marseilles. Though Jews had the status of citizens, subject to certain constraints, they took part in political debate and in the life of the city, both officially and unofficially, through their relations with the Christian patriciate. Political cooperation between minority and majority was determined by conflicts both within the Jewish community itself, and between Jews and Christians. Indeed, it was the rabbinical authorities and the town Council who together sought to maintain the symbolic barriers that kept Jews and Christians apart.

Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity (review)

Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, by Shmuel Feiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. 237 pp. $25.00. Moses Mendelssohn, the of modern Jewish thought, is an enormously complicated figure, with an even more complicated legacy. Shmuel Feiner's Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity attempts above all to disentangle the man from the myth. In the introduction and the conclusion, Feiner explicitly points out that Mendelssohn's influence has been disproportionately represented by later interpreters, who either laud or execrate him as the father of the Haskalah and reform in Judaism. Feiner suggests, however, that Mendelssohn's influence in regard to emancipation and the Haskalah are greatly overexaggerated. Indeed, his importance is more historical, as [h]e was among the first Jewish philosophers compelled to deal directly with the challenges of the 'modern Jewish situation'(p. 10). Feiner has rich subject matter in the life of Mendelssohn, whose considerable talents placed him in a remarkable and often extraordinarily difficult, if not outright impossible, position regarding the forces of the Enlightenment, the absolutist state, and the Jewish and Christian worlds of his day. Through careful attention to the early successes and later significant challenges that beset Mendelssohn, the heady excitement, the frustration, and ultimately the humiliation of being a Jew who embraced the Enlightenment project is poignantly illustrated. Feiner does a fine job illuminating the challenges faced by Mendelssohn as a public Jewish intellectual. Mendelssohn's philosophical acumen was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, he became wildly famous, and indeed, members of the Prussian Royal Academy of the Sciences elected him to become a member, although the King, Friedrich II, refused to grant approval to this appointment, ostensibly because Mendelssohn was a Jew. Mendelssohn was also widely sought out as a conversation partner by many philosophers, literary figures, and theologians. However, these conversations were not always innocent. In the case of Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian, who, taking liberties with comments from a private conversation with Mendelssohn, publicly challenged the famous Jew to refute Christianity or convert. As a result, Mendelssohn found himself caught in the center of controversy in matters of religious tolerance. Though Mendelssohn desired to devote himself to abstract matters of philosophy, the later years of his life were primarily involved with interceding on behalf of threatened Jewish communities, attempts to persuade Christians to reconsider and relinquish their anti-Jewish prejudices, and conflicts with the entrenched rabbinic authorities who saw Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment as a threat. …

‘Bendito sea A. que no me hizo indio ni negro’: Ethnic Paradigms in Menasseh Ben Israel's Esperança de Israel

This essay discusses a passage of Menasseh Ben Israel's 1650 text, Esperanca de Israel. The fragment that concerns us is in fact a transcription of a testimonial - apocryphal or authentic - given by a Sephardic converso, Antonio de Montezinos, who came to Amsterdam swearing in the presence of rabbinical authorities to the veracity of his experience. Montezinos claimed to have come across one of the lost tribes of Israel in 1644 living near what today would be Medellin, Colombia. The essay provides an overview of the long tradition of identifying American indigenous people as descendants of Jews, and shows how Menasseh Ben Israel's text marks a continuation of as well as a significant departure from the trajectory of this tradition. Another objective of the essay is to show how the ambivalence expressed in Ben Israel's text regarding the kinship of Jews and other ethnic groups in Latin America, namely indigenous people and those of African descent, prefigures similar such ambivalences in modern-day account...

Copyright Enforcement by Praise and Curse: The Colourful Development of Jewish Intellectual Property

Copyright law is an integral element of any society that values intellectual creativity. However, it is a relatively modern concept, developing only after the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. How did rabbinic authorities try to integrate an entirely new (yet increasingly relevant) body of law into the existing corpus of halacha while maintaining the integrity of the halachic process? And did they succeed? This article discusses the halachic foundations and justifications for modern concepts of intellectual property, and explores various theoretical underpinnings of copyright law and their applications to uniquely Jewish problems.

Judaizm wobec animacji ludzkiego embrionu

According to biblical anthropology, human beings are composed of body and soul. The question arises, however, at what moment does the body of the embryo possess a spiritual element? Can the breath of God visit the created and already developing in its own biological rhythm embryo? The key issue here is the moment of animation – the origin of a living being, which is created in the image and likeness of God. This article presents various Jewish points of views on the animation of the human embryo, all of which attempt to determine the exact moment at which the soul is breathed into the human body. Rabbinical authorities distinguish five different moments in this process: conception, the forty first day after conception, the birth of the child, the moment of circumcision and the moment in which the child is able to say “Amen.” The first three mentioned cases have the most supporters. The first refers to the simultaneous animation, while the other theories argue for successive animation.

The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture (review)

Reviewed by: The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture Joshua R. Jacobson The Organ and Its Music in German-Jewish Culture, by Tina Frühauf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 284 pp. $74.00 Tina Frühauf has given us a book that is as much about Jewish identity as it is about music. She presents the organ as a marker of Jewish identity: at first as a marker of assimilation in the context of nineteenth-century reformation, and later as a marker of dissimilation, as Jewish musicians sought to find a unique voice. The introduction of the organ into Jewish worship in Germany in 1810 stirred up a fierce controversy. In the opinion of most traditional Jews, the organ was treyf, totally unfit for Jewish worship. Since the fifteenth century the organ had been associated with Christian worship, and halakha forbade hukkat ha-goy—imitation of gentile practices. Furthermore, after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the rabbinic authorities had declared that the entire nation was in a state of mourning, and music, especially instrumental music, was inappropriate. And playing any musical instrument on Shabbat or a holiday was considered forbidden work (or might lead to the forbidden work of repairing an instrument). But the reformers countered that beautifying the worship service was one of the exceptions to the halakhic ban. They also pointed to the precedent of the magrephah, (according to some interpretations) a hydraulic organ used in the Temple in ancient Israel many centuries before the organ was used in Christian worship. But the elephant in the room was the early reformers' plan to remove any aspects of Judaism that were dissonant with the lifestyle of their German Lutheran neighbors. They eliminated traditional nusah (prayer chant) and cantillation, [End Page 180] and completely did away with the role of the hazzan (cantor). The rabbi, like his counterpart in the church, led the services, and the music consisted of chorales sung by the choir and congregation, supported by the organ. For the emancipated Jews of Central Europe the organ came to symbolize the enlightenment and their assimilation into a refined culture and a society into which they so desperately longed to be admitted. Decades later, moderate reformers sought a middle ground in which the hazzan regained his position on the bimah alongside the organ and the choir. Now the organ was used to accompany the cantorial recitative, to perform preludes and postludes, music for meditation, as well as to accompany congregational singing. Salomon Sulzer, the great cantor of nineteenth-century Vienna, reversed his initial opposition to the organ and opined that the mighty instrument could be used to "lead, control, to cover dissonances" in congregational hymns. His younger colleague in Berlin, Louis Lewandowski, composed organ accompaniments to traditional recitatives that boxed their free rhythms into a rigid meter of four beats to the bar, and their exotic Eastern modality into German classical functional harmony. Again the organ was being used as an instrument in the battle to purge Jewish culture of its "otherness." It was not until the first decades of the twentieth century that organ music displayed signs of dissimilation. Whereas nineteenth-century synagogue organists were church musicians who moonlighted on Saturdays, now we find a cohort of trained Jewish organists. Whereas previously enlightened Jews were eager to discard their otherness, now the banner of nationalism was ascendant. In the wake of growing antisemitism and inspired by Zionist ideologies, many Jews embraced rather than hid their ethnic identity. Inspired by composers such as Bartok and Rimsky-Korsakov, Jewish musicians sought to find their own unique voice, one that would blend East and West in a more equitable balance. The prosperous Jews of early twentieth-century Germany built huge ornate synagogues, equipped with some of the most elaborate organs in the country. When it came to power in 1933 the Nazi party segregated Germany's Jews into an apartheid situation. Banned from attending or performing in public concerts, forbidden to play music by "real" German composers, many Jews turned inward and discovered or rediscovered their Jewish cultural heritage. The synagogue became the venue for concerts of music by Jewish composers, the organ was increasingly...

Orthodox Jews in America (review)

Reviewed by: Orthodox Jews in America Michael A. Meyer (bio) Orthodox Jews in America. By Jeffrey S. Gurock. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. x + 381 pp. From a strictly Orthodox point of view, there can be no history of Judaism. Being of divine origin, the Torah is eternal and, therefore, the faith and practice of loyal Jews must remain unchanged. But there can be a history of its practitioners. Orthodox Jews live within history, subject to its vicissitudes and—despite affirmation of the perfection of their faith and its metahistorical demands—have differed significantly in their interpretations and practice. [End Page 119] In an engaging manner Jeffrey Gurock, the leading historian of American Jewish Orthodoxy, in this volume tells the story of Jews who claim to be Orthodox but vary significantly in the consequences they derive from that identification. Gurock's focus is not on the religious leadership, not on the rabbinical and lay organizations, but on amkha, the Orthodox Jews on the street. As an Orthodox Jew himself who has taught and administered at Yeshiva University, Gurock is clearly an insider. Yet his history is free of apologetics and, except for a special sympathy that he harbors for his own rabbi, Avraham Weiss of Riverdale, presents an impartial, indeed refreshingly critical account. Although we possess numerous books on American Orthodoxy written from a sociological perspective, this is, to my knowledge, the first full-scale historical treatment. Early American Jewry, according to Gurock, was religiously "out of control." Unlike the "old country," there were no rabbinical authorities or communal pressure to enforce conformity. Transplantation of the old ways did not work, and new ones appropriate to the American scene had not yet emerged. Those who remained loyal saw themselves as the she'erit, the remnant that remained, and sometimes they even used that term in naming their synagogues. By the eve of the eastern European migration, few Jews in America remained fully Orthodox. Men had cut their beards, women disposed of their wigs. The large influx of Jews escaping economic stagnation and antisemitism in tsarist Russia and seeking upward mobility in America did not produce a lasting surge of observance. Some came as secularists; others were not able to pass their landsmanshaft loyalties on to their children. Many in the second and third generation remained Orthodox by self-designation, but their practice through the interwar period was far from scrupulous. Perhaps the greatest contribution of this volume is Gurock's analysis of this period in the history of American Orthodoxy that lies between the immigrant generation and the resurgence of more recent years. In light of today's increasingly stringent Orthodoxy, it is remarkable to recall just how liberal it was during the 1920s and 1930s. In some Orthodox congregations men and women sat together, especially during late Friday evening synagogue assemblies (the Friday evening service at a fixed hour had been invented by the Reformer Isaac Mayer Wise almost a century earlier). In the synagogue there were mixed choirs, microphones on the Sabbath, and confirmations of young people. Sabbath desecration did not prevent the perpetrator from being called up to the Torah. Nearly all of the men worked on Saturday, which meant that many of them and their wives attended services only on the High Holidays, when "mushroom synagogues" sprang up, often in Yiddish theaters. Outside [End Page 120] the synagogue Orthodox men and women danced together at weddings and Orthodox Jewish college students hid their Jewish identity. In the virtual absence of day schools, children from Orthodox families attended public schools and received only meager supplementary Jewish education. Gurock suggests that what then kept American Jews together, including the Orthodox among them, was less their faith and practice than their residential propinquity. By 1971 only 11 percent of American Jews identified themselves as Orthodox. Although Orthodoxy still today continues to lose more members than it gains from non-Orthodox streams, it has since that time unquestionably undergone a resurgence in numbers (due mainly to births and lower mixed marriage rates), in fervor, and in influence. Gurock attributes the origins of this renewed vigor to the leadership presented by Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik on the modern side and Menachem...

Torah and Magic: The Torah Scroll and Its Appurtenances as Magical Objects in Traditional Jewish Culture

AbstractThis essay deals with a little noticed aspect of the Torah scroll in Jewish life and practice—namely, the usage of the scroll and its accessories in the context of sympathetic magic. The Torah is undoubtedly the holiest text in the Jewish tradition, and early on rabbinical authorities set a code that determined the fitting rules of conduct towards the scroll upon which it is written. In the course of time, the Torah scroll and the appurtenances associated with it emerged as the most sacred tangible objects in Jewish tradition and folk culture. Select Torah scrolls in various communities, especially in the lands of Islam, were elevated to a special position and were considered as possessing extraordinary protective powers. Aside from miraculous stories told about such scrolls, the popular beliefs in the power of the Torah scroll in general are best reflected in the ornamental appurtenances which enhanced the physical appearance of the sacred object. Thus, costly ceremonial objects such as the tik (Torah case) or rimonim (Torah finials) were decorated in several communities with magical designs and carefully selected texts, which reflect ideas of Jewish magic in general and are reminiscent of Hebrew amulets in particular.

Involvement of Rabbinic and communal authorities in decision-making by haredi Jews in the UK with breast cancer: An interpretative phenomenological analysis

This paper examines how Rabbinic and communal authorities participated in treatment decisions made by a group of strictly orthodox haredi Jews with breast cancer living in London. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five haredi breast cancer patients. The transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Demographic and personal data were collected using structured questionnaires. All participants sought Rabbinic involvement, with four seeking rulings concerning religious rituals and treatment options. Participants' motivations were to ensure their actions accorded with Jewish law and hence God's will. By delegating treatment decisions, decision-making became easier and participants could avoid guilt and blame. They could actively participate in the process by choosing which Rabbi to approach, by providing personal information and by stating their preferences. Attitudes towards Rabbinic involvement were occasionally conflicted. This was related to the understanding that Rabbinic rulings were binding, and occasional doubts that their situation would be correctly interpreted. Three participants consulted the community's ‘culture broker’ for medical referrals and non-binding advice concerning treatment. Those who consulted the culture broker had to transcend social norms restricting unnecessary contact between men and women. Hence, some participants described talking to him as uncomfortable. Other concerns related to confidentiality. By consulting Rabbinic authorities, haredi cancer patients participated in a socially sanctioned method of decision-making continuous with their religious values. Imposing meaning on their illness in this way may be associated with positive psychological adjustment. Rabbinic and communal figures may endorse therapeutic recommendations and make religious and cultural issues comprehensible to clinicians, and as such healthcare practitioners may benefit from this involvement.

Fixing God's Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law (review)

Reviewed by: Fixing God’s Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law Moshe Sokolow B. Barry Levy. Fixing God’s Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xvii + 237. God's Torah is perfect, restoring the soul; God's testimony is steadfast, making wise the simple. Psalms 19.7 Therefore were the ancients called scribes [soferim], for they would enumerate all the letters in the Torah. bKiddushin 30a From the time writing was invented, scribes have made mistakes. Moshe Sokolow Frankly, I initially found the title of this book offputting. Insert Torah, accuracy, and Jewish law into the same sentence and it appears to be an Orthodox "no brainer." Combine Torah and fixing, however, and it presents itself, to an Orthodox reader, as an almost heretical oxymoron. Happily, reading Fixing God's Torah disabused me of my reservations. B. Barry Levy, professor of religious studies and dean of the faculty of religious studies at McGill University, conducts us on a voyage of discovery that chronicles the traditional veneration of the Torah text yet surprises us by illustrating the genuinely critical lengths to which various rabbinical authorities were prepared to go in order to preserve their perception of its accuracy. Wielding talmudic passages and rabbinical responsa with the erudition and rhetorical dexterity of a talmid hakham (old world scholar), he enables his readers—scholars and laymen alike—to come to terms with the overt evidence of textual anomalies without surrendering their faith in either the Torah or in its rabbinic interpreters. The "protagonist" of the book is Rabbi David [ben Solomon] Ibn Abi Zimra (Radbaz; Egypt, sixteenth century), prolific author of over 2,400 responsa, several of which—featured in the book—deal specifically with the validity of the textual transmission of the Torah. In one case, Radbaz discusses the propriety of changing a word in the Torah to conform to the spelling indicated by the Zohar. Another responsum comprises an [End Page e29] important statement on the origin and authority of the Masorah (the collective scribal wisdom pertaining to the consonantal text of the Jewish Bible, its vocalization and accentuation) and the extent to which it should be used to determine the correct spelling of biblical words. A third deals with the letter waw in the word shlwm, "peace," in Nm 25.12, and whether it was necessary to follow a talmudic teaching that required it to be interrupted (ketu'ah). A fourth responsum considers a medieval suggestion to change the traditional reading of hw', "it," in Lev 25.33, to hi'. Levy also examines the position of the outstanding Spanish sage Rabbi Solomon Ibn Adret (Rashba, d. 1310), whose own responsa served as a basis and precedent for Radbaz. He inquires, as well, into Radbaz's use of the Masoretic notes of Jacob ben Hayyim Ibn Adoniyah, who prepared the text for Daniel Bomberg's "Rabbinic Bible" (aka Mikra'ot gedolot). Finally, he concludes with a brief examination of the attempts that have been made since the sixteenth century to reconcile Torah texts with those of Talmud and midrash, with particular emphasis on the twenty-one discrepancies noted by Rabbi Akiva Eger (Poznan, nineteenth century) in his glosses to tractate Shabat. Talmudic and midrashic literature, ranging from explicit references to variant readings among scrolls that were kept in the Temple precincts to allusions implicit in text-based hermeneutics, already testifies to the absence of complete uniformity among extant Torah texts. Given that testimony, it is difficult to comprehend why the suggestion of textual variation (mostly of the least invasive variety, comprising plene and/or defective spellings) should raise the hackles of religious Jews. Even granting that the minute care that was exercised in copying the Torah worked to severely limit the possibility of scribal deviation, ever since writing was invented scribes have made mistakes. And yet, the importance of the accuracy of revealed Scripture—and the implications of its absence—is hardly unique to Orthodox Judaism or even to Judaism in general. Witness the following claim made on behalf of the Koran: No other book in the world can match the Qur'an . . . The astonishing...

Fundamentalism in Crisis--The Response of the Gush Emunim Rabbinical Authorities to the Theological Dilemmas Raised by Israel's Disengagement Plan

Fundamentalism in Crisis--The Response of the Gush Emunim Rabbinical Authorities to the Theological Dilemmas Raised by Israel's Disengagement Plan

The Legend of Ger Ẓedek of Wilno as Polemic and Reassurance

Some time in the second half of the eighteenth century, there emerged a Jewish legend that glorified a conversion to Judaism and a martyr's death of a Polish noble from a very prominent Polish aristocratic family, sometimes referred to as Walentyn Potocki, or Graf Potocki—the legend of ger ẓedek, a righteous convert, of Wilno. The story was enthusiastically embraced by Eastern European Jews, and it subsequently became a subject of numerous novels and novellas. Even today its appeal continues. It is currently mentioned on a number of Jewish web sites as “a true story of a Polish Hrabia (count) . . . who descended from a long line of noble Christian rulers and who sacrificed wealth and power to convert from Christianity to Judaism,” and it serves as a basis for school plays in some Ḥaredi schools for girls. Although converts to Judaism were not unheard of in the premodern era, few stories of this kind emerged. Rabbinic authorities had an ambiguous attitude toward non-Jewish conversions, and few encouraged proselytizing or glorified non-Jewish converts. The legend of ger ẓedek of Wilno, though said to be a true story, appears to be a carefully crafted tale of conversion, a polemical and apologetic response to a number of challenges that the Polish Jewish community faced from the mid-eighteenth century.

Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (review)

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. 400 pp. $45.00. The Izbica/Radzin hasidic dynasty, founded by R, Mordecai Joseph of Izbica (1800-1854), was of the most creative and controversial hasidic groups in nineteenth-century Poland. Mordecai Joseph's teachings, contained in the Mei ha-Shiloah, introduced new perspectives on determinism, messianism, and antinomianism that reverberate to the present. His grandson, R. Gershon Henokh of Radzin (1839-1891) was the most important figure in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism after Mordecai Joseph. He was a prolific and erudite author and editor, editing and publishing the writings of his father and grandfather. Gershon Henokh's own writings covered four main areas. His Sidrei Tehorot (of which only two volumes were published) sought to create a Gemara for those tractates in the Order of Tehorot that had no Gemara. His second interest was the rediscovery of the tekhelet (the blue thread of the zizit). The majority of rabbinic authorities rejected this discovery, and only his own followers wore his tekhelet. He also wrote a number of traditional style hasidic commentaries on the Pentateuch that expanded on the teaching in the Mei ha-Shiloah. Fourth was a small work, ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha (Introduction and Preface), a preface to his father's commentary on Genesis, Bet Ya'akov al Sefer Bereshit. Magid concentrates on the last two areas of Gershon Henokh's work in this monograph, ignoring the first two areas. This work is divided into three parts. The first part, chapters 1-3, is devoted to a close reading and analysis of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha. Magid sees it as the programmatic foundation of Izbica/Radzin Hasidism. He also argues that it is one of the first attempts, internal to Hasidism, that seeks to place Hasidism in the trajectory of meta-halakhic Jewish literature, incorporating both medieval Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah (p. xii). These claims serve to justify the attention devoted to this fairly small text. It may indeed be a systematic attempt, but treatises are rare in Hasidism, and hasidic interest in Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is virtually non-existent. Magid's analysis is interesting, but he fails to demonstrate the importance and influence of the ha-Hakdama ve ha-Petikha beyond Gershon Henokh's own writings. The second part, chapters 4, 5, and 6, examines Gershon Henokh's understanding of free will and determinism as they emerge from his exegesis of the major biblical figures in the book of Genesis from the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the perfection of the biblical personality in the figure of Jacob, who integrates and unites the human and divine will. …

Culture-Sensitive Counselling, Psychotherapy and Support Groups in the Orthodox-Jewish Community: How they Work and How they are Experienced

There is political and scientific goodwill towards the provision of culture-sensitive support, but as yet little knowledge about how such support works and what are its strengths and difficulties in practice. To study groups offering culture-sensitive psychological and other support to the strictly orthodox Jewish community in London. Semi-structured interviews with service providers, potential and actual users from the community, and professionals serving the community. Interviews asked about the aims, functioning and achievements of 10 support groups. Thematic analysis identified seven important themes: admiration for the work of the groups; appreciation of the benefits of culture-sensitive services; concerns over confidentiality and stigma; concerns over finance and fund-raising; concerns about professionalism; the importance of liaison with rabbinic authorities; need for better dissemination of information. The strengths and difficulties of providing culture-sensitive services in one community were identified. Areas for attention include vigilance regarding confidentiality, improvements in disseminating information, improvements in the reliability of funding and attention to systematic needs assessment, and to the examination of efficacy of these forms of service provision.

From Institutional Decay to Primary Day: American Orthodox Jewry Since World War II

A number of works on American Jewry written during the early second-half of the twentieth century began with the contrast between the very pessimistic evaluations about the state of American Judaism at the end of the nineteenth century and the authors' more optimistic prognoses at mid-twentieth century.1 An even starker contrast can be made between the state of American Orthodox Jewry at the time of World War II and at the turn of the twenty-first century. The New York area has always been home to the majority of Orthodox Jews in the United States. According to the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey, 73 percent of those who identify as Orthodox Jews live in the Middle Atlantic states, i.e., New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In the 1920s and 1930s, the overwhelming majority were in New York City proper, and as a result of immigration from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1923-1926 the period was the "heyday of American Orthodoxy."2 The sense of elation and self-confidence dissipated rather quickly. Indeed, as Jeffrey Gurock's detailed analysis demonstrates, the first half of the twentieth century was the "era of non-observance" for American Orthodoxy,3 and Orthodoxy was increasingly viewed as doomed in American society. As Jenna Joselit put it, By the 1940s the English-speaking Orthodox rabbinate had suffered somewhat of a reversal and was forced to take stock of its future. Now muted, its characteristic buoyancy and optimism was succeeded by a barely disguised sense of thwarted expectations, especially pronounced among the second and third generation of RIETS [Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, Yeshiva University] students, as the interwar years gave way to wartime and the fifties. To the modernized Orthodox Jews, once confident that their form of Judaism would become the dominant religious expression of second-generation Americanized Jews, it now seemed as if a true modernized [End Page 405] Orthodoxy could be found only in isolated instances, in "pockets," and that the anticipated orthodoxization of middle-class American Jewry would not materialize. "A lost cause," reflected a RIETS graduate of 1942, "Orthodoxy was not going anywhere."4 One of the problems was that when immigration was feasible, the most traditional and Jewishly-educated of Eastern European Orthodox Jewry, and especially its rabbinic-intellectual elite, were the most resistant to migration to the United States for several reasons. As a rule, the more traditionally religious are the most resistant to geographic mobility, in part perhaps because of its negative consequences on religious participation.5 Eastern European Orthodox Jewry was further discouraged from migrating to the United States because of negative reports about religious life there. For example, New York's Rabbi Moses Weinberger (1854-1940), who had immigrated from Hungary, wrote a sharply critical portrait of Judaism in New York in the 1880s.6 He viewed American society as totally materialistic, and he bemoaned the low levels of Jewish education and observance of dietary rituals in the country. His book was in large measure a warning to his fellows in Eastern Europe that the United States was a spiritual threat to religiously traditional Jews. In the early 1890s, Rabbi Israel Meir Hacohen (1838-1933) of Radun, Belarus, one of the most revered rabbinic authorities of his generation, who was widely known by the title of one of his works, Hafetz Hayyim, published his own warning to Eastern European Jewry about the dangers of immigrating to America. In the conclusion to Nidhe Yisrael (The Dispersed of Israel), which is a work that clarifies some of the basics of halacha (traditional religious law) for those who were in "distant countries," especially America, the author warned of the risks of leaving Eastern Europe, and asserted that the economic opportunities [End Page 406] were not worth the price of losing one's Judaism or that of one's children.7 Several years later, in...

The Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society (review)

Meira Weiss. The Chosen Body: The Politics of Body in Israeli Society. Stanford University Press, 2002. pp. 232. Anthropological interest in Jewish bodies has historic roots in anthropometric measures used in German science between World Wars I and II to prove Jewish biological inferiority. Historian Sander Gilman, in The Jew's Body, traces efforts of pre-Nazi German science centuries back, referring, for example, to a medieval European physicians' correlation of Jews coming out of Africa black skinned due to syphilis, a condition shared with other Africans [1991:100]. Many sorts of others have been interested in scrutinizing Jewish bodies. The Jewish religion scrutinizes body. It requires male be circumcised at eight days of age. The religiously observant Jewish male follows a regimen of rituals prescribed by halacha, Jewish law, surrounding bodily functions. The Jewish female comes under Jewish law and ritual between first menstruation and menopause, subject to intense scrutiny by rabbinic authorities over issues of purity and pollution. Judaism is Israel's official state religion; in rites de passage, all Jewish citizens are subject to fundamentalist interpretation of halacha. In recent years, anthropological interest has focused on Israeli Jewish woman's body: Rahel Wasserfall on rules governing menstruation, Susan Kahn in Reproducing Jews on rules governing halachic interpretations for using modern technology to inseminate single and married women. Most recently, Susan Sered's What Makes Israeli Women Sick? analyzes reproductive body, militarized body, ritualized body, scrutinized and resisting to explain why Israeli women are far less healthy than Israeli men. The Chosen Body touches not at all on contexts cited above. Israel was born in 1948 in an uneasy balance of triumph and tragedy. It has existed in that perpetual uneasy balance, imposed and self-inflicted, since it was conceived as an idea in 19th century. Meira Weiss is an acknowledged member of socially privileged Ashkenazi sabra status group [native-born of European ancestry). She has devoted her professional life to dark, tragic side of Israeli life and culture. She looks at various ways in which the is constituted, and others, tragic non-chosen, are rejected. She conducts a special kind of participant-observation: she is a participant, an actor vested in system, perpetuating its darkness. She is an observer: using questionnaires to study different expressions of tragic in Israeli public and private life, collecting poems, newspaper articles, television and radio broadcasts and other cultural artifacts to illustrate her research interest. At times I wondered if, unintentionally, she got answers she expected to hear, if she asked loaded questions. The actor with vested interests is methodologically problematic. For this reason, examples of her questionnaires, and allowing those questioned to speak to us directly rather than through her voice, would have been appropriate. This is not an ethnographic account; it is more similar to cultural studies. Weiss traces Zionist story of historic origin of need for Jew for a new nation, physically distinct from weakling of Diaspora. She shows centrality of male in Israeli politic, a point made by psychologist Lesley Hazleton in her 1977 book, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind Myths. The difference between Weiss's focus and other feminist anthropologists writing about Israel is that they focused on impact of patriarchal on women. Weiss's focus is squarely on of idealized, perfectly formed, physically strong, young Israeli male of European ancestry. His is Jew for new nation, Chosen People's Chosen Body in modern state. Weiss traces impact of idealized male chosen on body politic in Israeli culture as a collectivity. …

Two Cases of Adultery and the Halakhic Decision-Making Process

Biblical sources that speak of God's participation in human courts notwithstanding, the judicial decision-making process is a human act.On biblical sources, see Ḥanina Ben-Menaḥem, “Postscript: The Judicial Process and the Nature of Jewish Law,” in An Introduction to the History and Sources of Jewish Law, ed. N. Hecht et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 423–424, 434. Rabbinic authorities, like judges in other legal systems, are fully subject to the many factors beyond the formal rubric of the law that influence interpretation, including educational background and personal experiences and values.From a historical perspective, there is no place for conjectures that halakhic decision-making simply uncovers what was already revealed at Sinai or that it reflects ongoing divine revelation. See the summary of such views in Aaron Kirschenbaum, “Subjectivity in Rabbinic Decision-Making,” in Rabbinic Authority and Personal Autonomy, ed. Moshe Sokol (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), pp. 63–64, 66–67. A criticism of judges as “living oracles” of the law who simply pronounce the meaning of various statutes in general jurisprudence can be found in Jerome Frank, Law and the Modern Mind (1930; reprint ed., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), pp. 35–36. Still, construing jurists may not always be aware of the existence of such non-legal considerations in their thought, and the influence that such concerns wield may rest just beneath their consciousness.See Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), p. 167. Even when they were aware of the influence of extra-legal factors, medieval and pre-modern Ashkenazic rabbis seldom, if ever, revealed them in the course of their halakhic discussions, for the halakhah, like any other legal system, has its own terms of discourse that rarely admit uncloaked expressions of extra-legal concerns into its process of reasoning.Hanina Ben-Menahem, Judicial Deviation in Talmudic Law (Chur: Harwood, 1991), p. 13, argues that extralegal considerations were accepted in the decision-making process of the Babylonian Talmud but were rendered normative halakhic criteria by their incorporation into the halakhah by post-talmudic authorities. An extended discussion of extra-halakhic considerations in the legal thinking of Rabbi David Ibn Zimra (Egypt, Safed; 1479–1573) can be found in Samuel Morell, “Darkei ha-shikul be-meṣiut ha-speṣifit be-piskat ha-RaDBaZ,” in ‘Atarah le-Ḥayyim: Meḥkarim be-sifrut ha-talmudit ve-ha-rabbanit le-khevod Professor Ḥayyim Zalman Dimitrovski, ed. Daniel Boyarin et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2000), pp. 413–438. On the question of determining matters based on internal legal standards alone, see Ernest Weinrib, The Idea of Private Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 12–13, 23–24, comments germane to the halakhic endeavor as well.

Cultural factors in orthodox Jewish adolescents treated in a day program for eating disorders

This study explores the specific role of culture and religion in the development of eating disorders (ED) in Orthodox Jewish female adolescents. We present eight cases admitted to a Day Treatment Program (DTP) for Eating Disorders. Additionally, some preliminary comparisons are examined between Orthodox and all other patients, and also between ultra and modern Orthodox patients. All eight adolescents were transferred from inpatient care, three met program treatment goals, two left prematurely, and three required re-hospitalization. The only significant differences between the Orthodox group and all other patients were on length of stay in the DTP and current use of psychotropic medications. Overall, results suggest that Orthodox patients and all other patients show similar ED presentation and course. However, there are unique cultural and religious circumstances, which require consultation with rabbinic authorities.

The Impact of Jewish Values on Marketing and Business Practices

Judaism, which relies on the Torah for its written law, has had a great impact on marketing and business. The Torah is replete with precepts dealing with business, and the Talmud, the source of Jewish oral law, elaborates and expands Torah law. The process is ongoing, and rabbinical authorities today build on the decisions of their predecessors to apply Jewish law to modern problems. Some of the issues examined in this article include honesty in the marketplace, fair pricing, employer-employee relations, and environmental issues. Jewish law is not only concerned with practical legal advice but in encouraging individuals to go beyond the requirements of the law and practice the “way of the pious.” Judaism does not have a negative attitude toward business and wealth—indeed, most of the Talmudic sages had occupations, and some were quite wealthy—but riches must be acquired honestly and used to help the poor, the needy, and the stranger.