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The book investigates how the emperor Julian (361–63 c.e.) uses Jews as ethnic Judeans in his hellenizing project to define Hellenic identity and to disqualify and delegitimize Christian ethnic claims. It concludes by summing up the main takeaways of the book for Jewish, Christian, and Roman historians of late antiquity.

Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of classical rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. The book traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, and examines sacrifice and worship in the temple as sites through which the rabbis negotiated new and old intellectual, political, and religious ideas and practices. In its focus on legal-ritual texts and in its cultural orientation, this book diverges from the prevalent approach to the cessation of sacrifice in early Judaism. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to transform a sacrificial religion into a non-sacrificial religion, Blood for Thought argues that the rabbis developed anewsacrificial vision. This new sacrificial vision does not seek to “substitute” obsolete sacrificial practices, but rather to rearrange, reframe, and redefine sacrifice as a critically important component of social and religious life. The book argues that through their seemingly technical legal and ritual discussions, the rabbis present remarkably innovative perspectives on sacrifices and radical interpretations of biblical cultic institutions, and that their reinvention of sacrifice gives this practice new meanings within the greater context of the rabbis’ political and religious ideology.

This is an account of five contemporary Hasidic dynasties and their complex process of succession. Two dynasties – Munkács and Boyan – describe a situation with too few successors, two – Bobov and Satmar – with too many, and one – Lubavitch – where the Hasidim deny a need for a successor at all claiming their last leader never really died. Each of these stories offers a narrative of continuity, of transformation in a group at once mysterious and yet transparent that seeks permanence in a modern world seemingly inimical to it. These are stories of the making and unmaking of men, a search for charisma and struggles for power, of families united and divided, of death and resurrection as well as hopes raised and dashed. They answer the eternal question of Hasidism: Who will lead us?

Judaism is often understood as the way of life defined by the Torah of Moses, but it was not always so. This book identifies key moments in the rise of the Torah, beginning with the formation of Deuteronomy, advancing through the reform of Ezra, the impact of the suppression of the Torah by Antiochus Epiphanes and the consequent Maccabean revolt, and the rise of Jewish sectarianism. It also discusses variant forms of Judaism, some of which are not Torah-centered and others which construe the Torah through the lenses of Hellenistic culture or through higher, apocalyptic, revelation. It concludes with the critique of the Torah in the writings of Paul.

This book is a synthetic study of the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, this monograph aims to answer this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. In addition to providing a vigorous defense of the need to contextualize the Talmud in its Sasanian milieu, as well as a roadmap for how to do so, the book includes a detailed examination of the Talmud’s dozens of texts that portray three Persian “others”—namely, the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. While most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside of the rabbinic academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. The final chapters of the book target two specific social contexts—courts of law and magic—where the Jews interacted with other groups. In all, this book demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the Jews of late antique Iran.

This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped and reinvented the biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity, and it argues that the purity discourse that the rabbis created generated a new and unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows that the rabbis construct the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as sites in which the relations between one's self and one's body—and, more broadly, the relations between one's self and one's human and nonhuman environment— are negotiated. Through their new form of purity discourse, with its heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis put new substance into the biblically inherited language and practices of purity and impurity, which closely resonates with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments that prevailed in the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries of the common era. The book thus adds a new dimension to the study of practices of making the self in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms function as sites through which the self is shaped and improved.

This contribution to ongoing debates about perceptions of the Jews in antiquity examines the attitudes of Greek writers of the Hellenistic period toward the Jewish people. Among the leading Greek intellectuals who devoted special attention to the Jews were Theophrastus (the successor of Aristotle), Hecataeus of Abdera (the father of “scientific” ethnography), and Apollonius Molon (probably the greatest rhetorician of the Hellenistic world). The author examines the references of these writers and others to the Jews in light of their literary output and personal background; their religious, social, and political views; their literary and stylistic methods; ethnographic stereotypes current at the time; and more.

In modern-day Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the “Vienna of the East” under the Habsburg empire, this vibrant Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after World War II, yet an idealized version lives on, suspended in the memories of its dispersed people and passed down to their children like a precious and haunted heirloom. In this original blend of history and communal memoir, the authors chronicle the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory. They find not only evidence of a cosmopolitan culture of nostalgic lore, but also of oppression, shattered promises, and shadows of the Holocaust in Romania. Their book presents a historical account of Jewish Czernowitz and offers an analysis of memory's echo across generations.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the legal material found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and its significance in the greater history of Jewish religious law (Halakhah). The study revives an issue long dormant in religious scholarship: namely, the relationship between rabbinic law, as written more than one hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, and Jewish practice during the Second Temple. The monumental discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran led to the revelation of this missing material and the closing of a two-hundred-year gap in knowledge, allowing work to begin comparing specific laws of the Qumran sect with rabbinic laws. With the publication of scroll 4QMMT—a polemical letter by Dead Sea sectarians concerning points of Jewish law—an effective comparison was finally possible. This is the first book-length treatment of the material to appear since the publication of 4QMMT and the first attempt to apply its discoveries to the work of nineteenth-century scholars. It is also the first work on this topic written in a style that is accessible to non-specialists in the history of Jewish law.

This book explores the nexus of time, truth, and death in the symbolic world of medieval kabbalah. Demonstrating that the historical and theoretical relationship between kabbalah and western philosophy is far more intimate and extensive than any previous scholar has ever suggested, the book draws an extraordinary range of thinkers such as Frederic Jameson, Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, William Blake, Julia Kristeva, Friedrich Schelling, and a host of kabbalistic figures into deep conversation with one another. The book discusses Islamic mysticism and Buddhist thought in relation to the Jewish esoteric tradition as it opens the possibility of a temporal triumph of temporality and the conquering of time through time. The framework for this examination is the rabbinic teaching that the word emet, “truth,” comprises the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alef, mem, and tau, which serve, in turn, as semiotic signposts for the three tenses of time—past, present, and future. By heeding the letters of emet we discern the truth of time manifestly concealed in the time of truth, the beginning that cannot begin if it is to be the beginning, the middle that re/marks the place of origin and destiny, and the end that is the figuration of the impossible disclosing the impossibility of figuration, the finitude of death that facilitates the possibility of rebirth. The time of death does not mark the death of time, but time immortal, the moment of truth that bestows on the truth of the moment an endless beginning of a beginningless end, the truth of death encountered incessantly in retracing steps of time yet to be taken—between, before, beyond.